Searching a 100 million stars for something like us

A pair of astrophysicists want to divert a new radio telescope to identify radio-emitting civilizations:

Eavesdropping on the Universe

...The MWA-LFD is a radio telescope designed to detect and characterize highly redshifted 21-centimeter emission from hydrogen molecules in the early universe. Its key scientific goal is to create a three-dimensional map of ionized "bubbles" that formed as the first quasars and galaxies flooded space with ultraviolet light billions of years ago. ...

.... Loeb and Zaldarriaga calculate that by staring at the sky for a month, the MWA-LFD could detect Earth-like radio signals from a distance of up to 30 light-years, which would encompass approximately 1,000 stars. More powerful broadcasts could be detected to even greater distances. Future observatories like the Square Kilometer Array could detect Earth-like broadcasts from 10 times farther away, which would encompass 100 million stars.

I't's hard to get too excited about surveillance of 1000 stars. It seems unlikely that civilizations would radio-emit like us for long, the odds of catching a 100 year slice of radio emission in the 3 billion year slice of a habitable planet is pretty low. A hundred million stars though ... That would be about the right order of magnitude. So maybe in forty years ...

TIME releases their pre-arranged introduction to my new Apple iPhone

Apple's New Calling: The iPhone. A few minutes after the conclusion of the Keynote, the TIME magazine article is online.

…Apple's new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them…

My wife will really enjoy my old Samsung i500 phone ....

Cannot resist. Must get Apple phone …

Macworld 2007 Keynote Liveblog - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

... . (Laurie notes: "I have a draw full of styluses.") It ignores unintended touches, multi-finger gestures and has patents. Or something like that. I think I jumbled things there a little bit. It is built on top of revolutionary interface with software that calls current mobile phones "baby software" and then mocks them. Yes, the iPhone runs OS X, children!!! W00t! ...

Who cares that it won’t work for two more revs. Who cares that I’ll have to dump Sprint (with a vengeance and bitter mocking laughter) for Cingular? Who cares that if I order it today it probably won’t show up for four months…

PS. The net appears to be combusting in some kind of nerd explosion. Blogger and Blogspot, in particular, have collapsed completely. Meanwhile Motorola is down .52%, Nokia is down 1.37% and Apple is up 2.21% (no, marke than 3.4%) and extremely volatile … Even Slashdot is laboring under the load, and they don’t allow non-subscribers to see the very latest articles …

Update 1/9/07: From Markoff in the NYT

One of the immediate questions that analysts and industry executives posed about Apple’s new product was why the designers eschewed the higher-speed Cingular digital cellular 3-G network. Mr. Jobs said later models would support additional networking standards.

Oh. Now the painful part. Cingular's EDGE network is very slow and their seems little hope that the phone can be upgraded to a 3-G network. There's a substantial risk the phone will become obsolete very quickly. OTOH, there is the WiFi support. Anyone buying this version of the phone should assume they'll use it primarily as a phone and messaging tool on Cingular's network, and as a computer only a WiFi network. Simple email may work on EDGE, but web browsing will be very painful.

Update 1/10/07: After the binge, the hangover sets in.

The Lord of the Rings and the Seige of Constantinople

My favorite radio/broadcast/podcast service is Sir Meyvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. It’s reason enough to buy an iPod all by itself, as well as being a scathing indictment of every other “talk” show in existence. The Seige of Constantinople is particularly good, and if one is a fan of a certain movie it comes with its own internal video stream … 

Telegraph | Entertainment | The day the world came to an end (Noel Malcolm)

... Even as a young schoolboy, I couldn't help noticing the uncanny resemblance between the siege of Minas Tirith in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the siege of Constantinople. On one side, the beautiful walled city with its ancient nobility and the few adventurers who had come to help in its defence; on the other, evil teeming hordes under a despotic ruler. You had only to look at the map in the end-papers, where the land of Mordor loomed to the east like Asia Minor, to get the point.

Tolkien even chose the name "Uruk-Hai" for some of his nastiest creations, fighting forces of Sauron who were a cross between orcs and goblins. This was surely borrowed from the "Yuruk", nomadic tribesmen used as auxiliary soldiers by the Ottomans. Few readers would have known that; but most would have got a whiff of something Asiatic here. For one thing Tolkien was outstandingly good at was tapping into the subconscious of our own, European, cultural history. ...

Alas, my working class education, though decent enough, was not the equal of Mr. Malcolm’s. On the other hand, it means there’s yet more to discover. The podcast is most highly recommended for those who, like myself, have a number of gaps in their cultural history. In addition to the terrible and wonderous story, it does give some valuable context to Cyprus, the European Union, Serbia, Turkey and Iraq. The thing about history, is that it isn’t.

More Dyer

2006 has a flurry of about 7 new articles online. I swear he's avoiding RSS simply to torment me.

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 ....