Phillip Carter on the Iraq study group recommendations: mediocre and disappointing

Phillip Carter, officer, veteran, lawyer, blogger, journalist and recent volunteer for Iraqi service, dissects the report the Iraq study group: The Iraq Study Group talked to generals when it should have talked to corporals. - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine. Briefly, the study group did a mediocre job. What they got right was obvious, what they missed was enormous. I can't summarize the article, Phil put a vast amount of thought into it. Read it and try to get your local representative to read it.

The Lundehund and the genomic plasticity of canines

Years ago few cared much about the biology of dogs. They are, after all, so common - and so "artificial". It was far more interesting to study wolves or sharks.

Times change. Dogs are weird. They are the among the most successful large terrestrial mammals in history based upon population, range, and their almost complete lack of predators (humans eat dogs in South Korea and in some parts of China). It is likely, given our longstanding commensal relationship, that they have altered human evolution. They have extraordinary variability in aging rates for a single species. They can read human faces and mimic human expressions and emotions. They're very hard to clone, and they have a weirdly plastic genome. Consider the Lundehund:

Damn Interesting � The Norwegian Puffin Dog

...To enhance traction on slippery rocks, and gripping in tight places, the Lundehund is a polydactyl (multi-toed) dog. Instead of the normal four toes a foot, the Lundehund has six toes, all fully formed, jointed and muscled. Polydactyl dogs are not terribly uncommon, but in most breeds the extra toes are dew-claws - non-functional vestigial toes, not the fully formed variety of the Lundehund. The dog uses these extra toes to gain purchase and haul itself along in positions where only the sides of its legs are touching the rock, a fairly common occurrence while wiggling through tight spots. They also help the dog gain additional traction while scrambling around on steep, often slippery cliffs...

The Lundehund is a weird animal, though much of its adaptations may come down to a connective tissue disorder which is also seen in humans (hyperelastic joints). Canine biology is fascinating indeed. The more we look at the history of human "breeds" 30,000 to 100,000 years ago the more interesting canine "breeds" becomes ...

Hail to the volunteer firefighters of Antioch, Illinois

Not every search works. All too often the rescuers find nothing, or a body. This time, in the dark of a cold night, they struck gold.

Wisconsin boy missing from hunting party found alive

... Two Antioch, Ill. firefighters, who were part of a large search group, found Ben Maerzke of Kenosha laying in the snow at about 1:40 a.m. Sunday about a quarter of a mile from where rescuers stationed their command post, sheriff's Sgt. Horace Staples and Floeter said.

... Staples said the boy was coherent but about to fall asleep and in a deep hypothermic state when firefighters found him in the 1,000-acre New Munster Wildlife Area.

... He was taken to Memorial Hospital in Burlington, where he was recovering from frostbite to his feet on Sunday night, the television station reported. He was to be kept overnight in the hospital and possibly released as early as Monday afternoon, the station said.

It's about 16 miles from Antioch to Wheatland. The Antioch firefighters are volunteers:

...The Antioch fire department consists of volunteer firefighters and a volunteer rescue squad...

These men (and women) were joined by a "large" (I'd guess hundreds) group of fellow heroes and family in the dark cold night. Hail to them all. They shouldn't need to pay for their beer for a while.

Update 12/7/06: Across the nation, another story of search ended in a mixture of sorrow and rescue. A two state search is so difficult, it is a minor miracle that Mr Kim's family was found alive. Rest easy Mr. Kim, you did all a father could do.

Wisconsin: 10. Minnesota: 1. State health rankings

As a Minnesotan, I am obliged to point out that Wisconsin was barely in the top 10:

State health rankings: The best and the worst

TOP 10

1. Minnesota
2. Vermont
3. New Hampshire
4. Hawaii
5. Connecticut
6. Utah
7. Massachusetts
8. North Dakota
9. Maine
10. Wisconsin

BOTTOM 10

41) Florida
42) Georgia
43) West Virginia
44) Oklahoma
45) Alabama
46) Arkansas
47) Tennessee
48) South Carolina
49) Mississippi
50) Louisiana

I must confess our ranking does not only reflect the smart living of Minnesotans. Yes, we do sweep the bicycle paths in January, and they do get used (I was once among the users, but now I have dependents). Yes smoking is less common every day. I must confess, however, that winter is hard on the infirm. They tend to die or move south.

Funny. Cruel. Apple and the Zune.

Daring Fireball: Conjectural Transcript of the Upcoming Negotiations Between Apple and Universal Music.

In which Jobs smiles.

MySpace debacle: virtual weapon or virtual parasite?

This is why evolved (vs. designed, ie bioweapons) organisms don't kill their hosts immediately:

MySpace worm uses QuickTime for exploit:

... The social networking site MySpace.com is under what one computer security analyst called an 'amazingly virulent' attack caused by a worm that steals log-in credentials and spreads spam that promotes adware sites.

The worm is infecting MySpace profiles with such efficiency that an informal scan of 150 found that close to a third were infected, said Christopher Boyd, security research manager at FaceTime Communications Inc.

MySpace, owned by News Corp., is estimated to have at least 73 million registered users.

The worm works by using a cross-scripting weakness found about two weeks ago in MySpace and a feature within Apple Computer Inc.'s QuickTime multimedia player....

....MySpace's "seemingly random tendency" to expire user sessions or log out users makes it less noticeable to victims that an attack is under way, according to a Nov. 16 advisory by the Computer Academic Underground....

...spam messages contain a file that appears to be a movie but instead is a link to a pornographic site that also hosts adware from Zango Inc., Boyd said. Zango, formerly 180 Solutions Inc., settled last month with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for $3 million over complaints that it didn't properly ask the consent of users before its adware was installed...

So, is this a (virtual) bioweapon aimed at Zango, with MySpace as a incidental casualty, a weapon aimed at MySpace with Zango as a red herring, or a very, very badly designed Zango-funded phishing scam?

If the latter, it's a great way to teach biology. Evolved parasites don't kill their hosts outright -- what's the point?

BTW, this is also technically interesting. The bug appears to be in MySpace, but there's a more subtle problem as well. QuickTime has a lot of embedded scripting power -- which can be used for good or ill. Flash does the same sort of thing. There's a tricky problem here with functional boundaries; features required for market success may become a part of emergent exploits. There must be biological equivalents; we should learn from how evolution manages compartmentalization. In the meantime, the advantages of adding functionality to software should be increasingly balanced against the likelihood of creating new exploits. One of the 2-3 buzzwords for the next 20 years will be 'complexity management'.

Neandertal: not gently into the night

Our primary ancestors, the skinnies, arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. There they found the remnants of the Neandertal (var: Neanderthal), one of many variants (species? subspecies? "breeds"? races?) of human. Cold adapted they'd survived for what we'd call a "long time", seemingly changing little. Thousands of years before the coming of the skinnies, however, the Neandertal were already suffering greatly....

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hungry ancients 'turned cannibal'

.... Starvation and cannibalism were part of everyday life for a population of Neanderthals living in northern Spain 43,000 years ago, a study suggests.

Bones and teeth from the underground cave system of El Sidron in Asturias bear the hallmarks of a tough struggle for survival, researchers say.

Analysis of teeth showed signs of starvation or malnutrition in childhood and human bones have cut marks on them.

Details appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some bones appeared to have been dismembered and broken open, possibly to allow access to marrow and brains.

"Given the high level of developmental stress in the sample, some level of survival cannibalism would be reasonable," the scientists wrote in their research paper.

The team, led by Dr Antonio Rosas from the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, also found that the bones shared physical features with other European Neanderthals from the same period.

Dr Rosas and colleagues found a north-south variation in Neanderthal jaw bones, suggesting that populations from southern parts of Europe had wider, flatter faces.

The findings may help shed light on the life and death of the Neanderthals, which became extinct about 10,000 years after the arrival of modern humans in Europe around 40,000 years ago.

Many experts believe they were not able to compete with the moderns for food and shelter.

The Neandertal did not go gently, or slowly. For 13,000 years, about four times the length of our recorded history, they declined as the earth warmed and the techies flourished -- taking caves and food with adaptive technologies and techniques. The skinnies liked the warmer weather. The Neandertal probably did too ... until they realized it came with a price.

Thirteen thousands years is a lot of hardship, though there must have been centuries of better times ...

Oppenheimer and the falling cost of havoc

I've blogged tediously about the falling cost of havoc. I didn't know, though I might have guessed, that Oppenheimer was far ahead of me (genius does that)...

How to Get a Nuclear Bomb (The Atlantic, December 2006)

... In 1946 Robert Oppenheimer sketched the problem clearly. In an essay titled “The New Weapon,” he wrote: “Atomic explosives vastly increase the power of destruction per dollar spent, per man-hour invested; they profoundly upset the precarious balance between the effort necessary to destroy and the extent of the destruction.” Elaborating, he wrote,

None of these uncertainties can becloud the fact that it will cost enormously less to destroy a square mile with atomic weapons than with any weapons hitherto known to warfare. My own estimate is that the advent of such weapons will reduce the cost, certainly by more than a factor of ten, more probably by a factor of a hundred. In this respect only biological warfare would seem to offer competition for the evil that a dollar can do.

I suspct Oppenheimer would have been surprised by our continued survival. I think of that when I contemplate how much the cost of havoc has fallen since his day. Whether by angels, aliens, or some emergent property of humankind, we seem to have cheated the odds. I hope the angels aren't tiring ...

Life with Microsoft OneCare - why Vista is doomed

I decide to upgrade my Microsoft OneCare test subscription to a full subscription. This is what happens:

1. Click on link. Opens Firefox. Microsoft tells me I have to use IE. Interesting. I thought they weren't allowed to do that any more.
2. Start up IE 7. Cut and paste link from #1.
3. Enter credit card information.
4. Get to the page that's supposed to update OneCare. Click. Wait. Wait. Wait.
5. After a few minutes click 'retry' link.
6. Get message one can't retry. (The link, you see, was a test. I failed.)
7. Go to support.
8. Try their automated support path. It fails.
9. Follow link to chat.
10. Chat requires ActiveX install. I click to allow, using the latest version of Microsoft's fabled browser on the latest version of XP. Installation process terminates the chat session.
11. Restart chat using back button. Get error message that I need to wait 30 seconds.
12. Wait. Try back button again. Screen is blank. Refresh screen. Now it works.
13. Chat rep says I need to call Tech support.
14. Tech support answers (quickly!). Says I need to call the registration desk. 9am-6pm PT on Monday.
15. On a whim, I try hitting one of the pages from my history file. Now it says 'congratulations. Indeed OneCare now works. Visit their OneCare service page. Experience several major usability errors in a few mouse clicks.

Vista is going to be such a disaster. Thank you Apple. I'm so glad I have only one XP machine to maintain ... and if Parallels works out, one day there will be none.

The quiet demise of the CD

A little bit of Future Shock, or perhaps I should say Future Bite. I've used some nice archival quality Verbatim CDs for years and I wanted a refill. I couldn't find them; the only CD spindles for sale on Amazon seem to be lower quality.

I finally figured out why. The price of 'archival' DVDs has fallen below the current price of CDs, so low that packaging and shipping is probably a significant part of product cost. I ended up buying a spindle of DVDs instead.

CDs are quietly disappearing. Alas, I should upgraded my mother's new Mac Mini to a DVD burner! Blank CDs will become increasingly unreliable and costly.

I remember reading the book written by Bill Gate's father (yes, his father) called 'The New Papyrus'. It was all about the how the data CD would revolutionize the world. This was before the net became public. I was amazed by the CD back then, and I wrote a letter to a Canadian development organization on how it could dramatically change the delivery of knowledge to what was then called the 'third world'.

Good-bye CD. We barely knew you ...

Update 9/25/09: See also - UK University lectures and iTunes U.

Stay the course, the iron fist, and game theory

One of the reasons I was able to let go of The Economist as its quality deteriorated was that I could turn to the many excellent blogs I read. Crooked Timber is among the very best, and here they trash the "we must not show we can be turned" by reference to game theoretic models (emphasis mine):

Crooked Timber: Reputations are made of …

....The point being that since game theory in general provides the analyst with so many opportunities to twist himself repeatedly up his own arse like a berserk Klein bottle, if a given real-world course of action appears to have nothing going for it other than a game-theoretic or strategic justification, it’s almost certainly a bad idea. Thus it is with that bastard child of deterrence, “credibility”.

... The idea is that the war is costing huge amounts of money and lives with no real prospect of success and a distinct danger that it is making things much worse. However, to do the logical thing would send the signal to our enemies that we will give up if fought to a pointless bloody standstill.Therefore, for strategic reasons, we must redouble our efforts, in order to send the signal to our enemies that we will fight implacably and mindlessly in any battle we happen to get into, forever, in order to dissuade them from attacking us in the first place.... What’s it like as a piece of game-theoretic reasoning?

Lousy. It is certainly true that one of the benefits of doing something stupid is that it saves you from having to spend money on maintaining your reputation as an idiot. However, is the reputation of an idiot really worth having?

It turns out that it can be proved by theorem that the answer is no. If the game of being a belligerent idiot with no sensible regard for one’s own welfare was worth the candle, in the sense of conferring benefits which outweighed the cost of gaining it, then everyone would want to get that reputation, whether they were genuinely an idiot or not. But if everyone wanted that reputation,then everyone would know that simply acting like an idiot didn’t mean that you were one, in which case it would be impossible to establish a reputation as an idiot in the first place. The point here is that it’s one of the more important things in game theory that a signal has to be a costly signal to be credible; like membership of the Modern Languages Association, a reputation in deterrence theory is something that is worth having, but not worth getting. People who use the word “signal” in this context (usually on the basis of a poorly understood or second-hand reading of Schelling) don’t always seem to realise that they are explicitly admitting that the costs of being in Iraq are greater than the benefits...

Friedman, another entity with a lost reputation, calls for a strategy of the persistent iron fist. That's a slightly different tactic. It's worth considering how that would turn out. Let us assume America used the "iron fist" approach. It's worked for many nations in the past. So ten years from now Iraq is "pacified". What does the world look like then? Well, we'd have Putin's Russia to the east - brutal and powerful. In the west we'd have ... well ... the same thing more or less. You don't get to the use the "iron fist" selectively. If it is used in Iraq, it is used at home, it is used with allies, it is used everywhere. Wouldn't that just be grand?

Friedman deflated

Tom Friedman, a pompous windbag who's also a billionaire by marriage, is taken down style.

Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque - Hideous Kinky: The Genocidal Fury of Thomas Friedman

.... Nowadays, of course, we hollow men, headpieces filled with straw, obviously lack the will to power. And so even while Tom adjures his great hero, the Commander-in-Chief, to unleash the re-invasion force (where Tom proposes to get 150,000 more fighting troops from remains a mystery; maybe China will loan us some), thereby "crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq's institutions and political culture from scratch," it's clear that he believes that the sissy-mary American public lacks the proper martial spirit to carry through the necessary 10 years of fisting that the Iraqis so clearly deserve. And so, more in anger than in sorrow, he proposes the only other possible alternative to a brand-new blitzkrieg: bugging out in 10 months time and forgetting the whole shebang ever happened. Otherwise, "it will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces...

Friedman is not the only person to lose his reputation and his credibility in the past few years, but few have been so public about it.

How long can you live in a vacuum?

Unconcsious in about 30 seconds, but no irreversible damage if rescued within 2 minutes. Considering one has only about 6-9 minutes in water, this isn't as bad as one might guess. Excellent essay.

iPod. Lame. iPhone. Laughable.

Daring Fireball has a funny and insightful essay on the reaction of Palm CEO Ed Colligan to the Apple iPhone rumors. I go with the theory that Colligan is a savvy CEO; he's really very worried about Apple but is spinning a good story.

The part that made me laugh, though, was the footnote referencing an infamous Slashdot posting on the iPod's launch. It's well worth a read, and, no, you can't add comments.

I'm holding on to my decrepit Samsung PalmOS phone until I see Apple's iPhone or it dies completely -- whichever comes first.

Spindle neurons: 30 million years in Cetaceans, 15 in primates

It's not often that a research results gives me goosebumps. This one did, since I'd completely missed that spindle neurons had previously been identified in the toothed whales (how the heck did I miss that?!). Emphases mine.

Humpback whale found to have 'human' brain cell - World - Times Online

Researchers in the US have discovered that humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins.

Studying the brains of humpbacks, Patrick Hof and Estel Van der Gucht of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York discovered a type of cell known as a spindle neuron in the cortex, in areas comparable to where they are seen in humans and great apes.

Although the function of spindle neurons is not well understood, they may be involved in processes of cognition - learning, remembering and recognising the world around oneself. The cells are also thought by some to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease and other debilitating brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

The findings may help to explain some of the distinctive traits exhibited by whales, such as sophisticated communication skills, the ability to form alliances and co-operate, the researchers report in The Anatomical Record.

They say their study may subsequently indicate that such whales are more intelligent than they have been given credit for, and suggests that spindle neurons – the likely basis for complex brains - either evolved more than once, or have gone unused by most species of animals, kept only in those with the largest brains.

.... the spindle neurons found in humpback whales were discovered in the same location as toothed whales, suggesting that the cells may be related to brain size, reported Reuters.

Toothed whales, such as orcas, are generally considered more intelligent than baleen whales such as humpbacks and blue whales, which filter water for their food.

The humpback whales also had structures resembling 'islands' in the cerebral cortex, also seen in some other mammals and which may have evolved in order to promote fast and efficient communication between neurons.

Spindle neurons are thought to have first appeared in the common ancestor of hominids, humans and great apes about 15 million years ago, the researchers added. In cetaceans they would have evolved earlier, possibly as early as 30 million years ago."

So many questions. What the heck could convergent evolution produce the same neuronal structure in both cetaceans and primates? Is there only one high-probability path to [whatever] from our ancient common ancestor? What does it mean to have 30 million years of evolution working on these structures rather than a mere 15 million? How the heck did I miss the discovery of spindle neurons in toothed whales in 2000?

One prediction. If we retain a liberal civilization (vs., say, Putin's Russia), creatures with these neural structures will have "human" rights within seventy years.

PS. My guess on why I missed this? The original discoveries of spindle neurons in dolphins may have predated theories of their unique role in human cognition -- so it didn't get much media coverage.

Update 11/27/06: More memories filtering in. I think dolphins pass the "mirror test". That is, they recognize that the image in a mirror is connected with them. I believe it was recently discovered that elephants also pass this test. I think cetaceans and hippos are related, more distant to elephants. I also dimly think there's some connection between the "mirror test" and "spindle neurons". So will we find elephants have spindle neurons?