The answer to the Fermi Paradox? Alas, probably not.

Personally, I think an answer to the Fermi Paradox belongs in Science, not New Scientist:

So much space, so little time: why aliens haven't found us yet | Science | Guardian Unlimited

... It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe - and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.

Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven't had enough time to look.

Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.

Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the "galactic habitable zone" of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.

Like humans, alien civilisations could shorten the time to find extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that might leak from colonised planets. "Even then, unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us," said Mr Bjork. "There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime," he added. ...

He gets a different answer from Fermi because there’s no exponential growth. The 8 probes have 8 subprobes, so it’s only 64 probes exploring the galaxy. Fermi assumed the travel of sentient organisms that then launched new exploration from each “residence”, so there were long residence times but there was exponential “probe” growth. Exponential growth conquers all.

Most modern formulations of the paradox assume self-replication of abiologic entities — the probes have the capability to construct copies of each other, so in a few generations there are trillions of probes.

If we find there’s some immense obstacle to self-replication then this result stands. If not the paradox stands. The most common resolution to the paradox is that technologic civilizations do not sustain an interest in travel, so Bjork’s answer is (to me) very enticing — it suggests a more optimistic answer. I’d describe Bjorks’ answer as “self-replicating machines cannot be created within the lifetime of technological civilizations”. So the difficulty of creation would set an upper bound on the lifetime.

The Guardian is misleading about where he published, btw. He published in an online repository, New Scientist just reported on it. This is interesting enough to merit updating my Fermi Paradox page however.

PS. This Slashdot comment is hilarious. The low rating is why I don't usually read Slashdot comments -- the raters are dysfunctional. (Comments are often good, it's the ratings system that's broken)

.. Negative. I find your argument untenable. I am in agreement with the Danish monkey-being. Probabilities of non-human life spreading through the Galaxy and discovering primitive monkey-beings in Sol System are minimal. Probability is on the same order of probability of a F'narthag slime-weasel evolving wings and taking flight. It is also highly improbable that extraterrestrial beings would colonize the pathetic planet Earth and blend into the primitive monkey-being society. They would be forced to hide in internet discussion groups and the tech sector so that they are mistaken for geeks when they display lack of monkey-being social skills....

The Slashdot commentators had the same response I did -- ignoring self-replication is nonsensical. The author came up with a silly reason why self-replication wouldn't work; he said the probes interfere with one another. Duh.

Sprint and Motrola conspire to sell me an AT&T (Cingular) iPhone

Sprint and Motorola must be conspiring to raise the share prices of AT&T (once Cingular) and Apple. I think the SEC should investigate.

How else can I explain the Motorola RAZR V3M? I bought this phone from pure necessity — an old phone had died and I needed a replacement. I don’t like any phone on the market today; this phone seemed to the best choice of a bad lot. A mixed bag of features, but the list price (which I paid, no contract extensions!) was about $200 or so.

Turns out, the phone is better than I’d expected. It took some significant effort, and lot of help from Google, but it’s possible to beat the Sprint out of it and make it a half-useful device with only a handful of atrocious usability flaws. True, Sprint’s high-speed network sucks the battery dry, but that wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so difficult to recharge it. Alas, that’s where the worm turns.

There are two big problems with the phone. One is the battery drain with data use, compounded with a difficulty in recharging. Despite the min-USB cable connector, it won’t charge from a conventional USB charger or a car USB power outlet. It will charge from a computer USB port — but only if one installs the (semi-secret) XP-only modem enabling utility. The other problem is that it can’t be used to attach a computer to Sprint’s data network — unless one installs the XP-only modem enabling utility.

The inability to accept a charge from a standard USB charger is highly annoying (it should), but I could live with that that if the RAZR would charge from my MacBook, iBook, iMac, etc. I could especially live with it (albeit gritting my teeth) if the phone would put my MacBook on the net when I’m not on a WiFi connection.

Alas, it’s not to be. Sprint and Motorola are simply insisting that I move to Apple/AT&T. Did Apple secretly give the CEOs of Sprint and Motorola backdated Apple stock options?

Obama's smoking habit

Obama smokes cigarettes.

That was quick.

The trillion dollar war

Loenhardt estimates a cumulative cost of the Iraq war/occupation of $1.2 Trillion (New York Times). His estimate is on the low end, the high end is 2 trillion.

The list of what we could have done with that much money is pretty impressive, but it doesn't include things like funding the retirement of the boomers. I imagine that's even more expensive. In the meantime, we still don't have much inflation and our currency still hasn't cratered.

A trillion isn't what it used to be. The market apparently believes the future is rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Naturally we boomers can't help but think "why should the kids have all the money"? Which is why some economists argue we shouldn't sacrifice much to fix global warming, since the future can better afford the bill (and it's not so bad for the US anyway, compared to, say, Africa).

I think there was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about this. Calvin uses his time machine/transmogrifier to shift his work to future Calvin, but future Calvin is no more reliable than current Calvin. Things go downhill from there ...

PS. The Firefox online dictionary includes the word "transmogrifies", which was made up by Bill Watterson in his strip. It's not an english word. Good for them.

Buy.com: why so much spam?

I get thousands of spams each month. It's extremely rare that any have a valid return address. The exceptions are politicians and Buy.com.

The politicians I understand. Mercifully they have consistent email addresses; a simple entry in my spamcop blacklist takes care of them.

Buy.com I don't get. I was getting one spam a week or so from them, so I clicked on the unsubscribe link. After that I got 3 spams a day - until I finally roused myself to blacklist them.

What the heck were they thinking?

Update 1/18/07: Looks like there were two spam streams, one direct and one through google checkout. My blacklist stopped the direct one, and google checkout supports disabling the mail address they used. So they had me twice. They're toast as far as I'm concerned.

The current manufacture and retail of custom assembled infants

No surprises here, we’ve seen this one coming for a long time …

The business logic of made-to-order babies. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

... Friday morning, an investigator from the Food and Drug Administration spent four hours questioning Jennalee Ryan of San Antonio, Texas, about her new line of business. That business, outlined a week ago by Washington Post reporter Rob Stein, is making and selling human embryos [jf: manufactured from eggs and sperm] from handpicked donors. The FDA says this doesn't appear to violate any rules within its purview. Embryo manufacture? Go right ahead. ...

Once it became apparent over 10 years ago that embryo donors were being paid well in excess of their “expenses” this was as sure as dusk and dawn. Ms. Ryan purchases eugenically optimized euro-only sperm and eggs, pays for the creation of embryos, and sells the embryos. If she doesn’t also provide surrogate mother services I’d be a bit surprised.

I see no reason why this won’t become substantially less costly than international adoption. It will also be less risky, as measured in terms of infant acquisition. The main limits to growth are probably the low costs of competitors entering the market, though the most genetically gifted embryos may remain expensive. (Ms. Ryan may also hold some important process patents.)

That’s capitalism. The market shall provide.

Incidentally, though it is perhaps not obvious from my writings, I do have a few selected domains of common cause with the catholic church …

An interesting Cato article?! Health insurance vs. health cost insulation

Hell must be colder than today’s Minnesota. There’s a Cato article I actually think has something interesting to say:

Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » Insulation vs. Insurance (Arnold Kling)

... How many American families have proper health insurance?

a) over 90 percent.
b) between 80 and 90 percent.
c) between 10 and 80 percent.
d) less than 10 percent.

Given that about 15 percent of American families do not have health insurance, the correct answer would appear to be (b). However, in my opinion, the correct answer is (d).

The health coverage most Americans have is what I call “insulation,” not insurance. Rather than insuring them against risk, most families’ health plans insulate them from paying for most health care bills, large and small. ...

It’s basically a call for health savings accounts and the like. Anything like this implemented by the GOP would be a catastrophe. We may see interesting experiments in states with GOP governors and democratic legislatures however.

Visualizing Information

(credit Bayesian Heresy). I’ve taught lectures on information and data visualization. Next time I’ll include this one:

New Economist: 98 ways to visualise data

... Let's start with the visualisation of data. Aleks Jakulins at the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog points us to a stunning periodic table of visualisation methods. The table provides 98 methods of visualising information. ...

Humanity: up from the sludge

Arnold Klink begins a review of humanity’s improvements with a Steven Pinker quote:

TCS Daily - Appreciating Our Moral and Mental Development

... "In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and was slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." ...

Oh.

Elsewhere I recently read the claim that the male violent death rate in a hunter-gatherer society is 30%. Our violent death rates are rather lower.

Two thousand years ago a bizarre doctrine that called for the forgiveness of enemies actually almost got off the ground. Fragments of it remain today. So, it’s not linear progress, but it’s hard to deny that it’s progress.

But why? That’s the interesting question. Is it all cultural? Is there some biological component as well? I suspect there’s something biological. I wonder if we have “aggression set points” that we switch between based on early childhood experience and maternal prolactin secretion. I wonder if, on a longer timeframe, we have “backup-gene collections” (these apparently exist in many species) that allow a human population to effectively switch cooperation patterns in a few generations depending on changing environments …

Update 1/17/2007: We know that mammals are capable of insect-like social systems (naked mole rats) and of differential adult behaviors based on early experiences. We know humans are among the most socially integrated of all mammals, rivaling the social integration of the insects. We also have "Hellstrom's Hive", a 1970s science fiction short story series that compared human social organization to insect life. I believe many insect colonies alter colony behavior and the drone/warrior balance based on environmental conditions. Hmmm.

Google blogger and the problem of asymmetric relationships

Google’s blogger hosts about 10 of my blogs, including this one. It has been, by an order of magnitude, the most troublesome of the Google tools and services that I’ve used. Recently Google has been moving blogs from the old infrastructure, which had been fairly trouble free over the past six months, to a new “better” (now buggier) infrastructure. The transition has not been going well; my blogs are too large and complex to move and they currently live on the increasingly abandoned old servers.

All of which has led to some thought about why this relationship isn’t working out. I think it’s a slightly different class of problem form the one that I use to have with Gmail. From my post to a Google Group:

Google Groups : Blogger Help Group > Something Is Broken

... Blogger (and Google) illustrates the generic problem of an asymmetric relationship between customer and vendor. Blogger may produce income for Google, or help tune searches, but the vast majority of Blogger blogs individually produce a trivial amount of revenue….

That would be fine if we and Google held similar opinions of the value of our individual blogs. If we both felt they were of trivial importance our relationship would work. Alas, we may value the content we've produced far, far more than Google values it. The relationship is thus doubly asymmetric; we bring little individual value to Google but we value our work far more than Google does.

The lesson I've drawn from my Blogger experiences over the years is not that Google is particularly evil, it's rather than asymmetric relationships are highly problematic. (Obviously the issue is systemic and applies to personal as well as business relationships.) If and when I move from Google/Blogger, it won't be to another asymmetric relationship. I would only move to a vendor where my voice mattered. Since my blogs will never generate much revenue, this means I will be paying for services in cash. ...

One part of the solution is a level of indirection between URL and blog service — at the very least one must control the URL. The value equation may change, and that may require a change in blog service …

Smoking: now for the menthol

My wife and I held our most recent weekly family meeting in the pub (no, the kids were home). It had been a long week.

On the way home, we passed the smokers in an external wind shelter. It was 10 F or so; they wouldn't have looked good in an ad. That's when we remembered pubs, bars, even restaurants (classrooms once upon a time) used to have smokers in them. We've gotten quickly used to a smoke-free world in the Twin Cities; a state wide ban is on the way.

It's not just the “progressive states”. When I was studying french in rural Quebec, my host family would meet to roll cigarettes every night (a most pleasant meeting too). Quebec now has a provincial smoking ban.

What's next? I usually think about regulating nicotine content, but an Atlantic (paywall) "primary sources" post reminded me that menthol is an adjuvant agent of addiction -- it slows nicotine metabolism. Eliminating menthol may be the logical next step ...

Update 1/16/07: Simple regulation would be wasteful of course. The better approach would to first put a differential tax on mentholated cigarettes. After a few years, add differential taxes based on nicotine content. This is the equivalent of a progressive decrease in nicotine patch strength done on a nationwide basis.

Dale Carnegie - the condensed version

After the Great War and before WW II, following a divorce and during the Great Depression, Dale Carnegie wrote an optimistic book - "How to win friends and influence people".

It's good bathroom reading, easiest to take a little bit at a time. On reading it I wonder if some of Carnegie's "friends" came to doubt the sincerity of his sentiments, but it's hard to argue with the general principles of the latter half of the book.

I figured it'd be useful to have an edited version of his "rules" at hand, and thanks to Wikipedia that's not hard. These are the "rules" I like the most ...

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
Begin in a friendly way.
Start with questions the other person will answer yes to.
Let the other person do the talking.
Let the other person feel the idea is his/hers.
Try honestly to see things from the other persons point of view.

Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Call attention to other people's mistakes indirectly.
Talk about your own mistakes first.
Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
Let the other person save face.
Praise every improvement.
Give them a fine reputation to live up to.
Encourage them by making their faults seem easy to correct.

Now in the modern world, try doing all this over the phone, without ever seeing the other person!

PS. I want anyone who might know me to understand I'm not delusional -- I don't claim to practice these recommendations. Still, one must have aspirations...

How to crack a system

Cryptonomicon, a reasonably popular science fiction book, includes an excellent introduction to cryptography. So I actually knew most of what Schneier tells us about how passwords are cracked...

Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords

... AccessData sells another program, Forensic Toolkit, that, among other things, scans a hard drive for every printable character string. It looks in documents, in the Registry, in e-mail, in swap files, in deleted space on the hard drive ... everywhere. And it creates a dictionary from that, and feeds it into PRTK.

And PRTK breaks more than 50 percent of passwords from this dictionary alone.

What's happening is that the Windows operating system's memory management leaves data all over the place in the normal course of operations. You'll type your password into a program, and it gets stored in memory somewhere. Windows swaps the page out to disk, and it becomes the tail end of some file. It gets moved to some far out portion of your hard drive, and there it'll sit forever. Linux and Mac OS aren't any better in this regard...

It's somewhat reassuring to know Schneier isn't perfect. As others note in the comments (I looked) he's wrong about OS X -- both the user directory and the swap file can be optionally encrypted with modest performance impacts.

Personally, I store my passwords in an encrypted database and I generate the important ones from GRC's password generator. My answers to the "personal question" are long strings of angrily typed characters ...

XP, however, is kind of hopeless. Maybe Vista is different.

Seeking Dickens: mental illness and prisons

We really need a Charles Dickens for the 21st century. Emphases mine.

The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars - New York Times
Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

... Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance.

After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people — resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan.

What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and ’50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates — only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new.

... It should be clear why there is such a large proportion of mentally ill persons in our prisons: individuals who used to be tracked for mental health treatment are now getting a one-way ticket to jail.

Of course, there are important demographic differences between the two populations. In 1937, women represented 48 percent of residents in state mental hospitals. In contrast, new prison admissions have consistently been 95 percent male. Also, the mental health patients from the 1930s to the 1960s were older and whiter than prison inmates of the 1990s.

... One of the most reliable studies estimates that the increased prison population over the 1990s accounted for about a third of the overall drop in crime that decade.

However, prisons are not the only institutions that seem to have this effect. In a recent study, I demonstrated that the rate of institutionalization — including mental hospitals — was a far better predictor of serious violent crime from 1926 to 2000 than just prison populations. The data reveal a robust negative relationship between overall institutionalization (prisons and asylums) and homicide. Preliminary findings based on state-level panel data confirm these results...

Harcourt is careful to note that the prison/institution relationship is not a simple substitution, but I'd be surprised if there weren't a strong relationship. Humans are really not all that well put together. We're running a 15,000 yo cognitive system way out of its operational range. We do astoundingly well all things considered -- but, really, we're very buggy thinkers. We need to to rethink the "problem of the weak" on many levels.

Damn Interesting: The Woman with a Limp

Damn Interesting is a new pickup for me. I can't recall how I came across it. It's well named; it belongs on everyone's bloglist. Enjoy!