Billions of planets and the prevalence of disease: Fermi looms

On of my favorite themes is back. The number of earthlike planets in the galaxy is a major component of the Drake Equation, and thus a contributor to the Fermi Paradox (aka, the mystery of the "great silence"). New data means astromers are starting to talk seriously about making estimates of the number of earthlike planets, and the number may be high:

New Planets Astound Astronomers in Speed and Distance - New York Times

... The results, astronomers said, confirm that planets occur across the galaxy with the same frequency that they do in the neighborhood around the Sun.

“We’ve learned now that planets are everywhere,” said Alan P. Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not part of the team.

“We’re beginning to be able to calculate how many Earths there are, how many planets are habitable, if not inhabited,” Dr. Boss added...

.... Dr. Boss noted that astronomers now had found in the Milky Way all the types of planets that are in our solar system: gas giants like Jupiter, ice giants like Neptune and rocky “super-Earths” orbiting other stars. “Everything we were looking for,” he said, “just not in the arrangement we were looking for.”

As potential planets are found in increasing numbers, Dr. Boss said, the odds increase that planets and planetary systems like Earth’s would be found.

Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of Dr. Sahu’s team, said, “There are literally billions of planets in our galaxy.”

As these numbers mount, the hoary old Fermi Paradox will inevitably worm its way out of the whacko cult of Fermi (in which I'm fully enrolled) into the greater gestalt. The more we see, the less unique our solar system appears, with exception. We know of only one world with sentience and technology. If such things were common they'd be inescapable.

In medical terms, a disease is prevalent (common) when it either occurs frequently (colds) or lasts a long time (obesity) or both. If technological civilizations are as rare as they seem to be, they either occur extremely rarely, or they don't stay as we are for very long. The "occur rarely" number shrinks as the number of earthlike planets grow. That leaves the other one.

Will the mobile phone dam burst in the US

D-Link has announced it will sell a $600 "unlocked" GSM phone in the US: D-Link Introduces V-CLICK Dual-Mode GSM / Wi-Fi Phone. Oh, yeah, it does WiFi too.

Will this break the dam erected by US mobile companies? As of now the US is a "developing nation" in terms of its mobile technologies, a result of an oligopolistic market. If vendors can make money selling interesting hardware, and if one or more national GSM providers cracks under the strain and offers GSM cards for the device that work, then the dam will burst. The big losers would be the non-GSM vendors. Bye-bye Sprint.

This phone may be irrelevant as a device, but it's fascinating as the first shot of what will be a great non-violent battle...

The limits of case-control studies: breast feeding and intelligence

Everyone who's ever written about breast feeding and intelligence presumably knew that IQ is largely determined by parental genetics and/or early environment and presumably tried to control for that. It appears they didn't control well enough:

Breast-feeding has no impact on intelligence

... The researchers found that although breast-fed children scored higher on IQ tests this was because their mothers tended be more intelligent, better educated and provided a more stimulating environment at home....

What's interesting here is not the apparently lack of effect of breast-feeding on IQ. That was always highly suspect and breast-feeding appears to have other advantages anyway (though I suspect those are overstated for cultural-political reasons). Nor is the inevitable confusion between correlation and causation particularly interesting. That's so commonplace it's boring.

No, the interesting part is that despite enormous statistical sophistication, we still have a lot of trouble drawing reliable conclusions from case-control studies. I wonder if a case-control study result is really any more robust than extrapolating from experimental studies on animal populations. Maybe we need to downgrade case-control and upgrade experiments involving non-human animals...

Physics speaks up: The trouble with Smolin

Lee Smolin has written a surprisingly popular book that's critical of the dominance of string theory in modern physics. It sounds like a solid book, but it's odd that it's so popular. I'm not sure why it's gotten so many reviews, etc. In some circles it seems to fit the "political correctness" conspiracy theory that "the truth" is being denied by incumbents who probably vote democrat.

In any case, Cosmic Variance has a gentle response, saying that Smolin is reasonably correct about the dominance of string theory, but his enthusiams for alternate theories are unpersuasive. String theory has won some interesting results, and the alternatives are doing less well than Smolin suggests.

It's an excellent review, and a readable introduction to what's topical in modern physics. We are dealing with the very tough problems; we're pretty much stuck waiting for either a new conceptual breakthrough or some unexpected experimental results.

The cursed gender: Take II

Again. BBC NEWS | Americas | US killer in sex abuse confession.

Before.

Gordon's Notes: The cursed gender

... It is hard to imagine a long future for my gender, at least not without some substantial genetic re-engineering.

Males should certainly not be allowed to own weapons. Maybe the NRA would accept a law that required all women to carry weapons, and no males.

In the longer term, if we survive as a technological culture, I'm rasonably sure males will either be upgraded substantially or eliminated completely.

In the short term, I'm interested in the psych profiles of the latest batch of men killing students, children, principals, teachers, etc. If we had better mental health care and related laws, could any of this be prevented?

Explaining the RNA Interference Nobel: Zimmer scores

NPR had a sadly incoherent discussion of this year's Physiology Nobel. It's a shame they didn't just read Zimmer over the radio: The Loom : A Nobel Prize for The Shadow Network.

Is there some point in the evolution of these complex interacting networks that the system starts to collapse of its own complexity? Does evolution then have to choose new directions, such as abstract systems for memetic evolution (aka, sentience)? Just asking ....

What would a collapsing evolutionary end-point look like anyway? Probably just a pile of viruses ...

Deconstructing human programming: The amygdala and the rostral angular cingulate cortext

Another step towards understanding the programming of the naked plains ape ...

FuturePundit: Brain Circuit Found That Resolves Emotional Conflicts:

... the amygdala generates the signal telling the brain that an emotional conflict is present; this conflict then interferes with the brains ability to perform the task. The rostral anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the frontal lobe, was activated to resolve the conflict. Critically, the rostral cingulate dampened activity in the amygdala, so that the emotional response did not overwhelm subjects’ performance, thus achieving emotional control....

On the bright side

On the bright side, hideous aliens from another galaxy haven't yet invaded our planet, reduced our cities to smoking rubble, and enslaved all survivors.

Oh, wait, if they have that would explain a lodftrdfaad urrrrkkkkk ...

New world: Lua, Brazil and Adobe Lightroom

I'm posting this here rather than in my tech blog because the significance is much broader than it might at first appear.

Adobe Lightroom is a major development from a leading software firm. It turns out that about 40% of it is written in "Lua", something I'd never heard of. Adobe did this so they could write code that would run on both OS X and Windows (Credit: Daring Fireball). Ok, so what's big here?

A few things. One, Lua was developed in Brazil, and the web site has both Portugese and English versions. So, globalization. Two, open source. Three, adoption speed. Four, for the geeks among us, Lua supports software who's behavior is configured and controlled by accessible data stores -- it's adaptive in a way that's big in software now (sometimes called model-driven computing) but is as old Lisp/Smalltalk etc. And, oh, yes, bytecode again.

The world, speed, winning by giving things away, adaptive software. That's the bright side of the 21st century .... (emphases mine)

Lua: about

Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language. Lua is free software.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways. Extensible semantics is a distinguishing feature of Lua.

Lua is a language engine that you can embed into your application. This means that, besides syntax and semantics, Lua has an API that allows the application to exchange data with Lua programs and also to extend Lua with C functions. In this sense, Lua can be regarded as a language framework for building domain-specific languages.

Lua is implemented as a small library of C functions, written in ANSI C, and compiles unmodified in all known platforms. The implementation goals are simplicity, efficiency, portability, and low embedding cost. The result is a fast language engine with small footprint, making it ideal in embedded systems too.

Lua is designed and implemented by a team at PUC-Rio, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua was born and raised at Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio, and is now housed at Lua.org. Both Tecgraf and Lua.org are laboratories of the Department of Computer Science.

'Lua' means 'moon' in Portuguese and is pronounced LOO-ah.

There's something really stunning about all this ... But maybe that's just me.

Pigou: where the rational left meets the rational less-left

Greg Mankiw is the the closest thing to a "rational right" person I know of. He's "close" because he once worked for Vlad Bush and because he's a Libertarian, which I think sort of qualifies as sort of on the right. (Would he work for Vlad again? He doesn't say these days.)

The Pigou Club is where he meets people like Al Gore and Paul Krugman. Follow the wikipedia link to get the background.

Neil Armstrong vindicated

Long ago we walked the moon. Yes, I know it seems unbelievable.

Anyway, Neil Armstrong, now 76 yo, has long been thought to have "flubbed" his historic catchphrase "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind"...

High-tech analysis may rewrite space history:

... In the 2005 book First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, Armstrong told Hansen that others have pointed out that he can often be heard dropping the vowels from his speech in his radio transmissions.

'It doesn't sound like there was time for the word to be there,' Armstrong said in the book. 'On the other hand, I didn't intentionally make an inane statement, and . . . certainly the 'a' was intended, because that's the only way the statement makes any sense.

'So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn't said -- although it might actually have been.'"

Emphases mine. New analysis suggests Armstrong did indeed include the vowel, but a communications glitch dropped it. Apparently whatever NASA was doing to conserve bandwidth tended to chop Armstrong's vowels ...

The complexity of causes: Pompey and the Fall of Rome

In 49BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and tyranny ruled Rome. Twenty years before, the laws of the Republic were swept away so that a terrifying threat could be ended...

What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us - Pirates of the Mediterranean - New York Times

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped...

With the acquiescence of an anxious populace, Pompey passed laws that gave him unlimited power, and he crushed the pirates with an efficiency Rumsfeld would envy. (Pompey was not incompetent.) Caesar used those laws to seize power.

Would the Republic have survived if Pompey's power grab had been thwarted? Perhaps not, the Republic had many problems. Pompey's power, however, was a leading indicator that the end of the Republic was near.

Khmer America: The fellowship of the waterboard

Recently the GOP legalized waterboarding. Today Crooked Timber provides us some historic context. The United States of America has joined the illustrious Khmer Rouge in the Fellowship of the Waterboard ...

Crooked Timber: What Waterboarding Looks Like:

The current administration is out there on torture together with the ******* Khmer Rouge.

and in comments ..

... Am I the only one here disgusted by this repulsive attempt to imply moral equivalence between our democratic torture, torture for the sake of liberty, democracy, Judeochristianity and free markets – with Khmer Rouge’s godless, evil, anti-market torture?...

May the ghosts of Cambodia visit the dreams of Vlad Bush.

Note that McCain voted for the torture bill. I would like to repeat that. McCain voted for this bill. On a day of infamy, that was a particularly sad note. With that act, he destroyed the reputation of a lifetime.

In the last election American Catholics swung towards Bush. The GOP has failed yet another test, how will the Catholic church respond this time? Will the religious right begin to wonder if they've chosen the wrong champion?

BTW, the October surprise? A direct attack on Roe V. Wade -- something to make the religious right forget the torture bill. (Incidentally, I think it is time for RVW to pass into history, but the October action will be done in the worse possible way ...)

PS. Regular readers note this is the first obscenity ever to appear in the posts of CT. There's cause.

How hot will it get? Hotter than ever.

Another analysis of historical temperatures has come out. The Look has summarized the article and presented the graph. The graph is a bit hard to interpret because it spikes so severely between 1900 and 2002. We're not talking hockey stick, we're talking rocket.

The easiest thing to do is follow the blue line for the 2001-2005 mean. The earth was super hot 400,000 years ago, and we're still about 1 degree C short of that. That was the hottest earth in 1.35 million years - as far back as we can go. If we don't do some radical CO2 reduction however, we'll blow by that record (pass it by a whopping 2 degrees C) and move out of the range of human evolutionary history.

Cut and run? Ok, maybe limp.

This is blackly funny. A GOP House candidate parrots Rove's tired 'cut and run' line, forgetting who his Democrat opponent is ...

WorkingForChange-Beyond the pale:

... In Illinois' 6th Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth of planning to 'cut and run' on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot, who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. 'I just could not believe he would say that to me,' said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane.

I hope Duckworth is savvy enough to have gotten a chuckle out her opponent's stupidity...