Charles Stross and the Fermi Paradox

Charles Stross is a former pharmacist, former programmer and journalist, certified geek, and current full time writer. Most people would tag him as 'science fiction' writer. From what I've read of his journals, and especially his books, he's terribly bright and very imaginative.

Accelerando is one of his commercially successful books (you can scan it for free before you buy). The amateur Amazon reviews are well done (one of the two 'professional' reviews is by someone who didn't read the book); I can't add much to them. The book does not fully succeed as a novel -- it was published as a series of short stories and it doesn't hang together all that well. There are some annoying plot holes (no security on the goggles? Did one of the lead characters flee to alpha centauri or commit suicide? Why is Pierre asking what happened - he was there?!), some dangling and overly fluid characters, and too many synopses of 'what went before'. The writing itself is professional, and that's no mean trick, but the work would have needed a harsher editor and a complete rewrite to fly as a novel.

That's ok, because it's really a series of speculative essays disguised as a novel -- and the thinking is deep and creative. I thought I was being a bit whacky when I blogged about the spanish inquisition as a corporation, and the emergent sentience of corporations in the ecosystem of economic interactions, but Stross goes much, much further. He plays with the idea that at some point the relationship between finance wizard and financial instrument might be inverted, so that souls would be traded by sentient financial instruments. That's not bad; I can just about see how it might happen ...

The embedded essay I most enjoyed reading, however, is on one of my all-time favorite topics -- the Fermi Paradox. This is one of those conumdrums that bothers a very few people a great deal and is irrelevant to most of humanity.

In short, we ought by all rights, to be overrun by little green beings. The puzzle is that we appear to have much of the galaxy to ourselves. To Fermi fan-boys this is the biggest question around, compared to which matters of theology or epistemology are merely derivative.

The answer to the Fermi Paradox is most often expressed in the terms of the Drake Equation. The best bet is that something utterly inevitable ends all technological civilizations like our own in well under a thousand years. The most popular candidate for an "inevitable fate" over the past 23 years has been the Singularity (Greg Bear's 1982 short story 'Blood Music' is the earliest version of the Singularity theory I know of, Vernor Vinge developed the ideas extensively in the early 1990s.) Stross takes these ideas and pushes the boundaries. Why might a post-singular entity find travel unappealing? Why would it be hard for entities like us to live near such a beast -- even if it didn't spend any time thinking about us?

Reading Stross is like having an extremely bright and free thinking fellow over for a beer (or something, these UK writers seem fond of a range of substances). He tracks all over the place, the narrative doesn't always hang together, but it's a heck of a lot of fun -- and where else can a geek get his Fermi fix?

Follow Me Here on Bush fatigue

Follow Me Here is the blog I read that's most like this one -- though FMH is more popular and more outward directed. Recently FMH wrote a retrospective post about years of blogging. I particularly emphathized with this portion ...

Follow Me Here... : 07/02/2006 - 07/08/2006

... Third, I have an incredible degree of Bush fatigue; it is not that I cannot get outraged anymore, but there is only a finite roster of ways in which a government can lie, cheat, steal, kill, destroy, and oppress. Bush and his minions have long since done them all; I have long since taken note of them here; nothing surprises me, and my outrage is constant and numbing.

And I have only a limited tolerance for my own frustration and despondency that a more effective movement of opposition has not arisen in response to his outrages. And I have no confidence that weblogs like FmH are change agents. (I don't know what would be effective activism these days, I guess, but I can no longer rationalize as I did for so long that FmH was an integral form of activist activity)...

I also started this blog partly because I felt compelled to do something about the terrible choice America made in 2000 -- or that was made for America. Something beyond campaign donations and volunter efforts.

After Bush was reelected, however, I couldn't pretend any longer that anything I wrote was going to make much of a difference. I, slowly and reluctantly, accepted that I didn't understand America.

Sure the media has screwed up. Sure some powerful people have used a lot of money and dirty tricks. At the root of things, however, is an American public that doesn't care, doesn't understand, and doesn't want to know. I can't fix that.

Like FMH I've mostly given up on political blogging. I'll toss in a few reminders here and there of the most egregious sins of this administration, but in general I'll just assume they're methodically dismantling our democracy and destroying our physical, economic, cultural and social world. Same old, same old. America has chosen, and I'm about ready to march off to Galt's Gulch (oh, wait, you don't let in our sort? Oops ...)

I do enjoy writing about ideas and trends though, and I'll keep doing that -- if only for my own amusement ...

Disbanding the CIA's bin Laden group: the bright side

There's a bit of a fuss about the closing of the CIA's bin Laden unit. Like most people, I have no way of knowing whether this is good or not. If whatsisname were still Director I'd assume it was very bad, but nowadays I can't say. I do think it has a bright side though.

bin Laden, it's been reported, is a typical zealot megalomaniac. The way to enrage him is to suggest that he's no longer important, that he's 'yesterday's news'. If he feels neglected, he may try to raise his profile. That's how he'll be caught ....

Google's weakness: devotion to the algorithm

I have four Google Blogger (Blogstpot hosted) weblogs I post to regularly. This is one. I've another that's pure geekery and product reviews and a third that's dedicated to special needs children. The fourth is purely for internal family use, nobody else knows the URL. All are hosted on blogger. All have only a modest number of regular readers (the tech blog generates the most traffic because people searching for answers to problems end up there fairly often).

Over the past few months all of them, 100%, have been tagged by "the blogger team" as spam blogs (splots). Every one of them, when I filed an appeal, were subsequently cleared:

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

I hope they're done now, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it again. What the heck are they using for an algorithm? What do they consider an acceptable 'false positive rate'? How many miscategorized bloggers simply give up? I'd ask whether Blogger would be so innaccurate if it cost them user revenue, but the answer to that question is just too obvious.

Which gets to the point of my post. Google's religion is the Algorithm, the belief that they can write rules against their de facto 'neural network' (web backmaps) and produce results competitive with human analysts. In this case the algorithms are failing, but Google persists in their use. That's a weakness. They need to emulate Amazon's Amazing Turk and use humans as their splog detectors ...

Update 7/9: Why are humans so good at detecting a splog, and computers so bad? One of the most common models for the evolution of intellect and sentience is that it's important for deception and deception detection. Spotting fakes and lies is fundamental to human cognitive function. A splog is nothing if not a lie. It's not surprising that humans will be very good at spotting them, and computers very weak ...

New old trends in software evolution

An otherwise unremarkable NYT article on Web 2.0 mashups ends with a review of some novel new projects. Similar projects were underway in the late 1990s, but they were derailed with the .com crash. I worked, for example, on an electronic medical record project that used some of these approaches. Now they're back. Very interesting. Now if only we could remove the relationship between employment and healthcare benefits. I think that's the single biggest block to new opportunities for many Americans ...

Software Out There - New York Times

... Another new idea comes from Amazon, whose Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden human chess player.

The idea behind the service is to find a simple way to organize and commercialize human brain power.

"You can see how this enables massively parallel human computing," said Felipe Cabrera, vice president for software development at Amazon Web Services.

One new start-up, Casting Words, is taking advantage of the Amazon service, known as Mturk, to offer automated transcription using human transcribers for less than half the cost of typical commercial online services.

Mturk allows vendors to post what it calls "human intelligence tasks," which may vary from simple transcription to identifying objects in photos.

Amazon takes a 10 percent commission above what a service like Casting Words pays a human transcriber. People who are willing to work as transcribers simply download audio files and then post text files when they have completed the transcription. Casting Words is currently charging 42 cents a minute for the service.

Other examples are also intriguing. A9, Amazon's search engine, is using Mturk to automate a system for determining the quality of photos, using human checkers. Other companies are using the Web service as a simple mechanism to build polling systems for market research.

The impact of modular software will certainly accelerate as the Internet becomes more accessible from wireless handsets.

Scott Rafer, who was formerly the chief executive of Feedster, a Weblog search engine, has recently become chairman of Wireless Ink, a Web-based service that allows wireless users to quickly establish mobile Web sites from anywhere via Web-enabled cellphones.

Using modular software technologies, they have created a service called WINKsite, which makes it possible to use cellphones to chat, blog, read news and keep a personal calendar. These systems are typically used by young urban professionals who are tied together in loosely affiliated social networks. In London, where cellphone text messaging is nearly ubiquitous, they are used to organize impromptu gatherings at nightclubs.

Recently, Wireless Ink struck a deal with Metroblogging, a wireless blogging service, to use its technology. Metroblogging, which already has blogs in 43 cities around the world, lets bloggers quickly post first-person accounts of news events like the July 2005 London bombings.

"Here are two tiny start-ups in California that care about Karachi and Islamabad," Mr. Rafer said. "It's weird, I'll grant you, but it is becoming increasingly common.

Nature: the top 50 science blogs

I read quite a few of the top of the top 50.

Managing North Korea: the special needs approach

This recommendation sounds a lot like the methods used to train exotic animals and some children:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com:

... North Korea definitely shouldn’t be rewarded for its tantrum, and punishing it is also a certain type of reward. No instead, we should cautiously ignore the Muddled Kingdom, work to remove it from the front pages, let its neighbors take the diplomatic lead, shake our heads in exasperation at what can only be described as really bad behavior of no true consequence, and then build a strategy to eliminate the country Eastern European-style, circa 1990.

I'd say give it just enough attention that it feels it's gotten some attention (lest it keep acting out seeking more), but keep it modest. Meanwhile it's all about Cold War II and doing everything possible to cause the North Korean government to collapse. I suspect we've given up on the idea of a 'go gentle while the NK slowly reform' and moved to 'collapse the state as quickly as possible'.

The history of Google Base

Anyone remember Google Base? I bought the hype. (Must remember, must remember ...)

Here's what happened. Or at least a plausible simulation ...

Treating injured brains with ECT?

In an earlier post tonight, I wrote about how different patterns of brain injury and incomplete repair might characterize traumatic brain injury and neurodevelopmental disorders such as "autism" and the personality disorders. I forgot in that post to note the researchers particular interest in Mr. Walter's prolonged antidepressant therapy. Researchers now think of depression as the clinical manifestation of a sort of brain injury, and recovery from depression is associated with neuronal proliferation (healing) in focal areas of the depressed person's brain. Antidepressants may somehow support or trigger that neuroproliferation.

Hmm. Injury. Healing. Antidpressants. Naturally one thinks of electronvulsive therapy, an old, mysterious, and remarkably effective treatment for severe depression. Does that also cause neuroproliferation? If so, would it have a place in treating traumatic brain injury, autism or personality disorders? (Of course the heyday of ECT, as dramatized in that infamous slander One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, it was used for just about everything.)

This would have occurred to researchers in the field many years ago, so I turned to PubMed. It turns out there's been a lot of rat brain work in the past five years. I couldn't find anything on ECT for traumatic brain injury, just old studies on whether ECT caused brain injury. I bet we'll see some animal studies on this topic within the year. As for ECT in autism -- the question has been asked. I think we'd need to have some reasonable animal models for autism before we could explore that one very much ...

Update 7/4: I was following the wrong path with ECT. This morning I remembered that Medtronic and others are using direct electrode "pacing" of brain tissue to treat Parkinson's Disease and depression. So the future is even closer than I'd guessed. We might end up using diffuse (ECT) or focal (pacing) electrostimulation to facilitate healing of a range of injured brains, including autistic brains. (This all reminds me of Accelerando ...)

Healing injured brains: implications for autism?

If injured brains heal over decades, how should we be treating adults with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders?

Be the Best You can Be: Healing brains, healing minds...

Porn spam, click through, and the haunting laughter of Leo Strauss

Wow. If this data is to be believed (big if), the click through rate on porn spam is about 6.5%. The only reason that I find this at all credible is that there's so much porn spam out there. With this kind of click through, it all makes sense.

There's still the possibility that maybe half those click-throughs come from adolescent males who are known to be insane and thus not responsible for their actions. Excluding them, it would mean that only 1/30 email users are a danger to themselves and others and should be committed.

Even so, between this and recent American elections, I'm definitely souring on democracy. Alas, Strauss is getting the last laugh ...

One big happy family: the universal ancestor

Associated Press has a somewhat tortuous article following up on a recent Nature publication on human geneology. I think it's a bit easier to read chopped into pieces:

Roots of human family tree are shallow - Yahoo! News

... everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.

"It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book "Mapping Human History" traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.

... With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years — and probably on the low side of that range — to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.

Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther — about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago — everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.

... most of the people who lived 1,200 years ago appear not twice, but thousands of times on our family trees, because there were only 200 million people on Earth back then. Simple division — a trillion divided by 200 million — shows that on average each person back then would appear 5,000 times on the family tree of every single individual living today.

... Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree.

... When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely created by one of your ancestors — every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person was almost certainly your ancestor, too.

It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham, they are all bound to be right.

"No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu," Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.

... Seven years ago one of Olson's colleagues, a Yale University statistician named Joseph Chang, started thinking about how to estimate when the last common ancestor of everybody on Earth today lived...

... A few years later Chang was contacted by Olson, who had started thinking about the world's interrelatedness while writing his book. They started corresponding by e-mail, and soon included in their deliberations Douglas Rohde, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist and computer expert who now works for Google.

The researchers knew they would have to account for geography to get a better picture of how the family tree converges as it reaches deeper into the past. They decided to build a massive computer simulation that would essentially re-enact the history of humanity as people were born, moved from one place to another, reproduced and died.

Rohde created a program that put an initial population on a map of the world at some date in the past, ranging from 7,000 to 20,000 years ago. Then the program allowed those initial inhabitants to go about their business. He allowed them to expand in number according to accepted estimates of past population growth, but had to cap the expansion at 55 million people due to computing limitations. Although unrealistic in some respects — 55 million is a lot less than the 6.5 billion people who actually live on Earth today — he found through trial and error that the limitation did not significantly change the outcome with regard to common ancestry.

The model also had to allow for migration based on what historians, anthropologists and archaeologists know about how frequently past populations moved both within and between continents. Rohde, Chang and Olson chose a range of migration rates, from a low level where almost nobody left their native home to a much higher one where up to 20 percent of the population reproduced in a town other than the one where they were born, and one person in 400 moved to a foreign country.

Allowing very little migration, Rohde's simulation produced a date of about 5,000 B.C. for humanity's most recent common ancestor. Assuming a higher, but still realistic, migration rate produced a shockingly recent date of around 1 A.D.

... One ancestral link to another cultural group among your millions of forbears, and you share ancestors with everyone in that group. So everyone who reproduced with somebody who was born far from their own natal home — every sailor blown off course, every young man who set off to seek his fortune, every woman who left home with a trader from a foreign land — as long as they had children, they helped weave the tight web of brotherhood we all share.

Could there be exceptions? Australian aborigines were isolated a long time ago...

Revenge of the consumer: Think Amazon.com

In the old days, brands mattered. Brands had reputations, slowly earned and slowly lost. Companies had to be careful about what they did.

Then brands died. In a commodity world, only price matters. Every crooked angle, every corner cut, every hidden thing removed, goes to the bottom line. The result has been a plummeting drop in the quality of services delivered and goods manufactured, a drop so steep that I suspect it comprises a underground ocean of inflation (1/2 the price and 1/3 the lifespan is inflation).

For every action, there is a reaction. A countervailing force has emerged...

AOL Said, 'If You Leave Me I'll Do Something Crazy' - New York Times

...People who left online comments about Mr. Ferrari's AOL call expressed delight, more often than disbelief, in seeing public exposure of an AOL experience similar to their own. "The same thing happened to me" is a refrain among the posts. Before the advent of the Web, an encounter with inept customer service was ours to bear alone, with little recourse or means to warn others. Now, Mr. Ferrari can swiftly post on the Web a digital "documentary" that recorded his dismal experience, and news-sniffing hounds do the rest.

With the enthusiastic help of users of Digg, the much-visited site that lets readers rate news stories, the online world found its way to Mr. Ferrari's door. (Actually, too many curiosity seekers arrived that day: the server that hosted his blog crashed hard when about 300,000 visitors tried to push through the door at about the same time.) YouTube did its part in spreading the word, by making available a replay of the AOL call that was part of Mr. Ferrari's appearance on the "Today" show on NBC.

YouTube was also the place to enjoy a new one-minute gem titled "A Comcast Technician Sleeping on My Couch." The technician, in Washington, had arrived at Brian Finkelstein's home to replace a faulty modem and had to call in to Comcast's central office. Placed on hold just like powerless customers, the technician fell asleep after an hour of waiting.

How should Mr. Finkelstein have responded? By writing a letter of complaint to some distant regulatory authority that will require years before it acts? Far more effective means are now at hand. He recorded, then uploaded the video clip with some humorous asides about missed appointments and unfulfilled promises, and got immediate satisfaction in the act of sharing. More than 500,000 viewers have watched Mr. Finkelstein's video "thank you" note to Comcast.

AOL and Comcast executives in charge of customer service may long for the good old days when they had to deal only with a finite number of federal regulators...

Ok, so AOL is easy pickings. I remember when they were a quality company -- but that was before the internet when they were Macintosh only. I left them about 14 years ago.

They're not alone however. Dell has been just as evil, not to mention SONY and just about every manufacturer in a commodity world. Revenge is as close as Amazon.com. A well written, factually oriented statement of the user experience, particularly when backed up by a 'true name' author, is a wicked right hook to a company that's making revenue by hiding quality cuts. Before you buy, always read the Amazon reviews -- particularly the negative ones. It will server you well.

If you do have a bad experience, see if the produce is sold on Amazon. Register your 'true name' so you get your posts up guickly. You don't have to have bought the produce on Amazon. Make your review factual and unemotional. Help make the world a better place, and get some satisfaction. Opportunities to combine good action and revenge are rare, so take advantage of them!

Drunk driving less disruptive than thought ...

The media has widely reported that cell phone use impairs driving ability as much as a blood alcohol of 0.08.

Of course the media reports don't give us enough data to make any decisions on, thus my slightly tongue-in-cheak posting title. It's noteworthy that other studies suggest a conversation in the car may be equally distracting. I find my kids to be far more distracting than phones, passengers, alcohol or incoming meteors, but our situation is perhaps atypical.

If I were to be daring, however, I'd wager we'll discover that the subjects they're doing these tests on (grad students?) probably drive as well when intoxicated, under test conditions, as does the average healthy 75 yo in late afternoon.

Arms race in the market: Dynamic vs. predictive pricing

Airlines price seats on some combination of supply, demand, and psychology. Dell does this with their large and short lived "specials". Amazon has tried dynamic pricing too, though I'm not sure they're still doing it.

Well, as sure as night follows day the market has produced a countervailing force. The evolutionary arms race continues:

Airfares Made Easy (or Easier) - New York Times

.. Mr. Etzioni helped to create Farecast, an airfare search engine that also predicts how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall over the coming days...

... Farecast could become a great tool for consumers because it uses much the same techniques that airline computers have used to extract the maximum amount of money from the flying public. It is the latest Web site to harness cheap computing power to hazard predictions on all sorts of everyday things and make the data available to consumers.

One such site introduced this year was Zillow.com, ... It mines data in county land records to hazard a guess on the value of 65 million homes across the United States...

Inrix, based in Kirkland, Wash., crunches data to predict traffic....

... "This is Shopping 2.0," said Hugh Crean, Farecast's chief executive. It goes one step further than Web sites like Kayak, Sidestep and Farechase ... that search the listings of the airlines..

A traveler picks the dates and destination of the trip just as he would at any other online airline travel site. (The Farecast site has flights only to and from Seattle and Boston, but promises to have all the major American cities by year-end.) Farecast generates a list of the scheduled flights, listing them from cheapest to most expensive.

What's different is that at the top of the screen is an arrow that points the direction Farecast's computer predicts fares are headed. Farecast even specifies how much it will change.

I'll have to add these links to my Firefox bookmarks -- much handier now that Google syncs them to all my machines, and to my business travel web page.

I suspect the big money for Farecast will come from corporations, at the very least they'll use the threat of Farecast to get a better deal from airlines. Airlines may try to game the system, or they may find it's easier to reduce dynamic pricing -- which would put Farecast out of business.

Where's it going to go? The "military computer becomes sentient" is a staple of science fiction. Skynet is the best known popular example. Maybe, but maybe it'll be predictive pricing, or games. When predictive pricing software starts incorporating neural networks from rats (as in that infamous F-22 simulator rat brain) and it's time to start digging ... :-) Oh, wait, it's too late ...