There is snow in Minnesota

Rumors to the contrary, there's snow in Minnesota in January!

Trail snow depth: Koochiching State Forest - Tilson Creek Ski Trail
Local snow depth is 6-8".

Wow. The trail is even open -- with a 2" depth. All you need to do is drive a few hundred miles north of the twin cities and go east of International Falls, once known as the ice box of the nation.

Otherwise the state's beautiful web site for snow conditions shows brown everywhere, and almost every Nordic ski trail is closed. None of the non-refrigerated ice rinks in the metro area are open.

I read that this is an El Nino year, so maybe there's hope for something 3 years from now -- but by then the net warming and drying trends may make this year the norm. The new Minnesota climate feels to the casual observer to be dry throughout the winter and winter weather that feels about 5-8 degrees warmer than most of the 20th century. Sure, the state web site says the average temp is only up 1 degrees F, but that's the entire state and the year-round average. For example, the MSP summers seem milder than they used to be, which would mask the dramatic winter changes.

I'd like to see a fifty year chart of average January temperatures in the Twin City metro area. I'll keep looking ...

Update 1/8/07: This UMN climatology page is just what I was looking for. MSP residents live in a Missouri climate nowadays, but there there were warm Januarys between 1890 and 1940 -- if you believe the old temperature records.

Update 1/8/07: Several stores are sold out of replacement basketball backboards in the TCs. BB is one of the few outdoor activities that still works around here now ...

Credit score - forget it. You want your Security Score ...

I wonder what my score is ...

Schneier on Security: Automated Targeting System

If you've traveled abroad recently, you've been investigated. You've been assigned a score indicating what kind of terrorist threat you pose. That score is used by the government to determine the treatment you receive when you return to the U.S. and for other purposes as well.

Curious about your score? You can't see it. Interested in what information was used? You can't know that. Want to clear your name if you've been wrongly categorized? You can't challenge it. Want to know what kind of rules the computer is using to judge you? That's secret, too. So is when and how the score will be used...

As anyone who's done any public health or medical school should know, the vast majority of "hits" from this system will be on completely innocent people.

Pelosi delivers: maybe things will get better ....

DeLong is Proud of Our Congress. I'd forgotten what it was like to have leaders who were not craven, corrupt and stupid. The House did noble work today.

The fatal flaw in distributing encrypted media

The new HD-DVD encryption scheme has been partially, but not completely, broken.

Studios’ DVDs Face a Crack in Security - New York Times

...If the person who identified himself as Muslix64 is able to create a complete version of a decryption program, or if others extend the software so that consumers without technical expertise can readily make copies of movies, that would create a crisis for the HD-DVD camp. That system contains a “revocation” mechanism for shutting down HD-DVD players whose encryption system has been compromised. But industry analysts say that taking such a step would give the HD-DVD system a tremendous black eye, angering consumers and shaking the confidence of Hollywood studios in the system.

Today’s DVDs are protected using an earlier encryption technique known as Content Scramble System, or C.S.S. That system was undermined in 1999 by a small group of programmers, and movie studios have said that the new A.A.C.S. would not fall victim to the same kind of technological attack...

Interesting story, but it's not the fatal flaw in DVD encryption. The fatal flaw is that the media is physical, and thus out of control of the rights holders. Sooner or later, sometime in the next 20 years, the "old" keys are released or broken, and shortly thereafter every movie on every physical DVD will become shareable.

The movie industry presumably knows this; they must truly hate the entire idea of HD-DVD and any form of persistent distribution of movies.

They deserved better leadership ...

The NYT today profiled a few of the American soldiers who've died recently in Iraq. Sergeant Fry was the last story of the article:

A Grim Milestone in Iraq: 3,000 American Deaths - New York Times:

... A team leader, Sergeant Fry, who shipped out to Iraq in September 2005, disarmed 73 bombs, including one of the biggest car bombs found in Falluja. Once he helped defuse a suicide vest that insurgents had belted to a mentally handicapped Iraqi teenage boy. The boy had been beaten and chained to a wall. Another time, he spotted a bomb from the roof of a house. A little boy popped into the yard, hovering dangerously close to it. Sergeant Fry won his confidence by playing peekaboo, then got him to move away.

He was in 'very high spirits' in March, calling his wife to say that his duties were done, his paperwork filed and his anticipation impossible to stifle. 'He had made it,' she said. Then a mission came down, and commanders were preparing to send a team of mostly inexperienced men to defuse bombs along a road in Al Anbar province. He volunteered for the job, instead. 'That is how he led,' Mrs. Fry said.

Sergeant Fry found three bombs that night and defused them. But the insurgents had hidden a fourth bomb under the third one, a booby-trap. It blew up and killed him. An Army team stayed with his body for six hours, fending off enemy fire in the dark until soldiers with mortuary affairs arrived to take his body away.

They deserved great leaders, they got the Bush/GOP team. I hope the leadership, at least, is improving ...

Convergence: HDTV LCDs and Computer LCDs

One day we figured computer displays and TV displays would converge. Jeff Atwood says the day is now. I agree about the UI issues with hi res computer displays, which is why both Vista and OS X are moving away from bitmaps to resolution-independent UIs. HDTV is 1920x1080 (another weird aspect ratio btw), the Apple 30" is 2560x1600.

Gulf War II: The critic's view summarized

The New York Review of Books: Iraq: The War of the Imagination summarizes the Woodward, Suskind and Risen on the Bush administration's path to perdition with additional commentary and footnotes. Mark Danner promises a future article on the "third act", namely what comes now.

Bush/Cheney et al combined bad data with bad judgment and terrible execution to produce a strategic blunder an order of magnitude worse than the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. America dutifully reelected them, so their voters share the blame.

Despite all that has gone before, I am cautiously optimistic. There is so much at stake in Iraq that many powerful forces, and immense numbers of less powerful people, will conspire to try to salvage the situation; albeit at an immense cost in lives and economic productivity. Perhaps, if there are enough of these forces, the colossal and catastrophic incompetence of George Bush and Dick Cheney can be managed and redirected, and these two men can retire to give speeches we can all ignore.

The strange economics of PC Games: why are so many junk?

Amazon.com: Cars Radiator Springs Adventures (Win/Mac)
sells for $18. My son wants it, but the reviews on both Amazon and the Apple website are unusually dismal. It appears to be genuine junk.

Now, I admit it's not that unusual in the 21st century to buy stuff that's pure junk. The cost of ownership of this worthless junk is mind-boggling -- but it's everywhere. PC/Mac children's games, however, seem even junkier. Console games don't seem to have the same problem.

Why does this strategy, which is basically fraud, work for PC/Mac games vendors but not for console vendors? My guess is it has something to do with the absence of copy protection, naive buyers, and the collapse of the PC/Mac games market. In this environment, maybe fraud is the only successful strategy ...

Free Will RIP - The Economist on preemptive punishment

It has begun.

"Free Will" was a convenient fiction; the transmutation of the Soul into something that could live, for a time, with science. It was always doomed to folow the Soul into the exile of theology, the only question was when. I said my farewell in the early 1990s -- neurosciences and genomics had shrunk Free Will into a tiny remnant of its old self. In retrospect it didn't really matter, whether by the happenstance of circumstance or the tyranny of genetics we are the products of chance. The Calvinists covered this long ago.

It takes a while for something like this to sink in though. This editorial in The Economist tells us that the news has traveled from the heralds of science fiction to the realm of politics...

Liberalism and neurology | Free to choose? | Economist.com

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility for one's actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime and conception were “freely” entered into, then social relations would be very different...

...At that point, the old French proverb “to understand all is to forgive all” will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be happening. At the moment, the criminal law—in the West, at least—is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.

Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.

Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument.

In fact, you begin to erode all freedom. Without a belief in free will, an ideology of freedom is bizarre. Though it will not happen quickly, shrinking the space in which free will can operate could have some uncomfortable repercussions.

Yes. The Economist, slow as it is, is a bit quicker than the mainstream media. The others will follow over the next two to three years, with conversations in movies and the talk shows.

How will the realization dawn? Will there be a ferocious counter-attack, or will we discover that the edifice of resistance has been crumbling in the West? Hard to say, but I don't think this is much of an issue for most faiths. All functions of Free Will can readily revert to the Soul, and many Christian faiths have dropped Hell -- removing the most troublesome issue with a supposedly benevolent deity. Calvinists, of course, have never had a problem with those born to be damned. The going is even easier for Hindus and Buddhists, but I'd wonder about Islam...

The death of a Free Will is, however, a problem for "true (19th) liberalism" (i.e. The Economist) and, if they exist, compassionate Libertarians. The long feared embrace of 20th century Liberalism looms for both.

It will also be a significant challenge to modern American evangelical Protestantism, which has promoted the separation of Free Will from Soul and combines a "just" (but not merciful) God with eternal damnation. Something will have to give there.

Kudos to The Economist for launching the conversation, and for connecting it to the oncoming train of preemptive punishment.

Update 1/19/07: See also (all connected to The Economist, interestingly)

• you are a robot
• the chemistry of love
  

Levitating globes, calculators and $18 digital cameras

DeLong notes how cheap computing changes the economics of toy construction:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Levitating Desktop Globes

...It's now cheaper to have a computer sense the position of the globe and increase or decrease the strength of the top magnet in order to pull the globe up or down than to have a cradle of magnets underneath...

Silicon is sand, and sand is cheap. In the same vein, my local gas station is selling a Philips digital camera/camcorder for $18.00. Sand and plastic; once the developments cost has been recouped there's no basement for the price.

Calculators took the same route 30 years ago. Like embedded chips and the low end digital camera they were just sand and plastic; eventually low end calculators became so cheap they could only be sold as add-ons and gimmicks.

Curiously, the personal computer has remained conspicuously expensive. Only recently has mainstream computing begun to approach to price point of the Commodore 64 ... Too many moving parts ....

Die smarter? Longevity genes, Alzheimer's and gambling with Faust

The 'related links' section of this SciAm summary are also of interest:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Single Gene Could Lead to Long Life, Better Mental Function -- A variation of a gene that controls the size of cholesterol molecules in the bloodstream is common among elderly Ashkenazim who remain mentally sharp

... Those centenarians who passed were two to three times more likely to have a common variant of a particular gene, called the CETP gene, than those who did not. When the researchers studied another 124 Ashkenazi Jews between 75 and 85 years of age, those subjects who passed the test of mental function were five times more likely to have this gene variant than their counterparts.

The CETP gene variant makes cholesterol particles in the blood larger than normal. The researchers suggest smaller particles can more readily lodge in the lining of blood vessels, leading to fatty buildups, which are a risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

Whether or not this gene variant protects the brain by preventing this buildup, or through some other mechanism, remains uncertain, says Barzilai. Future research should also investigate whether this gene has an effect on dementia associated with Alzheimer's disease, says pathologist and human geneticist George Martin at the University of Washington.

Pharmaceutical companies are currently developing drugs that mimic the effect of this gene variant, says Barzilai. Unfortunately, one known as torcetrapib, manufactured by Pfizer, was pulled in December due to increased death and heart problems among study subjects, "but others in development aren't seeing that, so it might just have been a problem with that drug," says Barzilai. "If not, it's a question people might face--whether or not people want to prevent Alzheimer's even if there's a small risk of getting a heart attack.

Fascinating basic science, but like all good basic science it mostly raises questions. For all we know now this gene doesn't so much provide longer life, as kill off those who lack some other compensatory gene that provides benefits. It might, for example, be primarily an Alzheimer's reduction gene that also increases the risk of heart attacks, so if you sample elderly people with the gene you're finding those who have some other factor that offsets the heart attack effect.

Alas, many "beneficial" genes turn out to have a Faustian component -- such as trading slower aging and faster healing for more cancer. (Turns out mice do this big time -- if they're not killed they almost always die of cancer -- but they heal fast.)

Which brings us to Barzilai's comment. The promise of modern pharmacogenetics is really about optimizing the Faustian bargain. So you make a "deal with the devil", but the deck is stacked in your favor. If your MI risk is low but your dementia risk is high, then you might opt for an anti-dementia drug that increases the risk of MI. If your dementia risk is high, and your MI risk is average, you schedule bypass surgery in 8 years. Who needs recreational bingo when you can gamble on this scale?

Keeping up with the metagenome

Biology has changed a bit since the day -- and yet not so much. In my 1970s biology classes ecosystems and emergent interactions were very fashionable ...

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog : 2006 12 0 The metagenome and obesity

...the introduction to the paper by Turnbaugh et al. (2006:1027) puts it well:

The human 'metagenome' is a composite of Homo sapiens genes and genes present in the genomes of the trillions of microbes that colonize our adult bodies. The latter genes are thought to outnumber the former by several orders of magnitude. 'Our' microbial genomes (the microbiome) encode metabolic capacities that we have not had to evolve wholly on our own but remain largely unexplored. These include degradation of otherwise indigestible components of our diet, and therefore may have an impact on our energy balance.

Hawks is highly recommended for anyone who wants to track the development of modern biology and, of course, anthropology.

Fertility and wealth: a paradox resolved?

The wealthier and more powerful women become, the fewer children they have.

I've heard dozens of explanations for this seemingly biologically insane behavior, but none of them made sense to me. It's been in the back of my mind for over twenty years.

Now the paradox may be heading towards resolution:

BBC NEWS | Health | Large families 'bad for parents' : "

...They add the findings also suggest why women now tend to have fewer children.

'If women have generally incurred greater fitness costs of reproduction, this could explain why they generally prefer fewer offspring than their husbands and reduce their fertility when they obtain more reproductive autonomy.'

The researchers assert a strong correlation between number of children and maternal mortality. If true this would help understand the apparent wealth paradox. A caveat however, I have little faith left in case control studies. The only reason this one has any persuasive power is that it fits with what we see in other animals.

It's probably not only the direct effect of bearing children -- the paternal mortality also rises ...

Racism is alive and public in Virginia's Republican representative

Of course racism never went away in American culture or politics, but for years it was at least disguised. Virgil Goode Jr, the GOP representative for Virginia, has done the nation a great service by ripping off the disguise. His racism, and perhaps that of his constituents, is now on international display. Emphases mine ...

Congressman Criticizes Election of Muslim - New York Times

In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

... Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”...

... “I’m looking forward to making friends with Representative Goode, or at least getting to know him,” Mr. Ellison said, speaking by telephone from Minneapolis. “I want to let him know that there’s nothing to fear. The fact that there are many different faiths, many different colors and many different cultures in America is a great strength.”

... Dennis Prager, a conservative columnist and radio host, condemned the decision as one that would undermine American civilization.

“Ellison’s doing so will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal — the Islamicization of America,” said Mr. Prager, who said the Bible was the only relevant religious text in the United States.

“If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress,” Mr. Prager said.

In his letter, Mr. Goode echoed that view, saying that he did not “subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” He also called for ending illegal immigration and reducing legal immigration.

Linwood Duncan, a spokesman for Mr. Goode, said the Virginia lawmaker had no intention of backing down, despite the furor.

“He stands by the letter,” Mr. Duncan said. “He has no intention of apologizing.”

Bravo Mr. Goode. Please don't retreat into some feigned mealy-mouthed faux apology. Your pretty blond face will give us a living symbol of the evil that lives at the heart of the GOP. I didn't get to vote for Mr. Ellison (neighboring district), but now I wish I could have. Mr. Ellison's reply, "making friends" is diabolical; guaranteed to drive Mr. Goode into a frothing rage that somebody will capture for YouTube.

I'm sure Mr. Goode and Mr. Prager would feel much the same way about, shudder, a Jew, Hindu, or ... horror of horrors ... no, I dare not mention it ... an atheist taking office.

John McCain -- this is your party ...

UK robotics report: why you should really read science fiction

As a proper geek-child, I was very fond of comic books and science fiction. I also took a typing class, which in my day was considered the province of secretaries. I never imagined both choices would prove to be so practical. A good lesson for our latest educational obsessions.

The value of my 1970s typing classes is, of course, now obvious. The value of my science fiction vice is having been long prepared for the latest news:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Robots could demand legal rights

.... Robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans, according to a study by the British government.

If granted, countries would be obligated to provide social benefits including housing and even 'robo-healthcare', the report says.

The predictions are contained in nearly 250 papers that look ahead at developments over the next 50 years.

.... The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre.

The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF)....

Duh. Well, yes. If robots, or non-robots for that matter, become sentient they will acquire rights. The tricky part, which I wrote about in my Williams College ethics class in 1981, is how "rights" are afforded when one steps away from DNA. Does a severely retarded human child earn more "rights" than a genetically enhanced chimp? Does a super-sentient AI get more "rights" than the most brilliant, wise, handsome, rich, etc human? (My 1986 medical school ethics essay was about how those questions expose the degree to which morals and mores are a pragmatic compromise between ethical theory and the limits of human wisdom.)

Overall, I suspect the "Horizon Scanning Center" would have done as well to buy a copy of each the yearly "hard" SF anthologies printed since 1975, but it must have been great fun to work on the reports and I'd enjoy reading them. I hope they go online sometime.

I was struck, when I first heard this news on NPR, that the journalists were relatively sober. That's noteworthy. Ten years ago the chatter would have been flip, today there was only a hint of humor. These memes are infiltrating the human gestalt...