Conservapedia: and now for something completely different

Different, as in very funny:

Conservapedia | Cosmic Variance

.... Everyone is having their fun with Conservapedia, a rightward-tilting alternative to Wikipedia that aims to ensure that future generations of conservatives grow up really dumb. A mildly-close look reveals that the major biases of Wikipedia that made this new project worth launching are (1) their insistence in using “CE” (Common Era) rather than “AD” (Anno Domini) in giving dates, and (2) the occasional Anglicized spelling....

CV provides some hilarious Conservapedia entries, please do read the post. At the moment the site is being overwhelmed by parody posts, but I'm sure it will settle down to a duller, but no less foolish, state. The good news is that any migration from Wikipedia to Conservapedia can only raise the IQ of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Carter: can he be made a saint?

Jimmy Carter, age 82, leads an underfunded and increasingly successful assault on river blindness. True, he's not catholic, but couldn't he be made an honorary saint anyway?

I was going to title this "Give the man the damned peace prize already" -- but then I remembered that he finally got the prize in 2002.

Update 2/25/2007: Rumor has it that Carter is pressing Gore very hard to run. I don't America is good enough to merit someone of Al's quality, but we do need him.

How to murder 100,000 people - and get away with it

Counterfeit drugs, mostly manufactured in China, are widely distributed in Southeast Asia and Africa. The thugs have a lot of blood on their hands ...

In the World of Life-Saving Drugs, a Growing Epidemic of Deadly Fakes - New York Times

Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organization has estimated that a fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly...

I'm generally not in favor of the death penalty, but it is tempting to make an exception for wealthy entrepreneurs who kill thousands of people.

Which brings me to tobacco. Tobacco executives sell an addictive product that, when used as directed, kills thousands. From a purely ethical perspective, disregarding minor details of law, are they substantially less evil than these counterfeiters?

Krugman has broken me. Oh, and Edwards health plan

A colleague has been dropping off printouts of Paul Krugman's TimesSelect column to my desktop. I'm thereby reminded that there's nobody else in mainstream journalism willing and able to write fact based in-your-face disclosures of what Sauron (Bush/Cheney is the current incarnation) is up to. Krugman is Molly Ivins with less humor but a stronger platform and far more data. Now that Molly has died there's no-one else playing in this league. Alas, the NYT put Krugman behind their $50/year paywall. Conspiracy theorists figure this was a way to silence him, but I think the NYT made a bet-the-ranch decision that people like me would crack -- sooner or later.

Congratulations NYT, you've won. I've cracked. Here's $50. And so, here's Krugman on the Edwards health plan...

Edwards Gets It Right - New York Times

...People who don't get insurance from their employers wouldn't have to deal individually with insurance companies: they'd purchase insurance through ''Health Markets'': government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public's behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills -- not the function of granting insurance in the first place -- outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting -- the process of screening out high-risk clients -- are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies' overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, ''Health Markets,'' the press release says, ''will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.'' This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now -- after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan's low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. ''Over time,'' the press release says, ''the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.'"

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable...

This is a great example of why I need Krugman. I skimmed the Edwards plan and came away feeling a bit disappointed. On quick glance it seemed to miss the key issues. Krugman is smarter and looks deeper, and reveals that the Edwards plan is serious and meaningful. Put me down in the Edwards camp -- unless, as Robert Reich half-predicts -- Gore announces his candidacy at the Academy Awards. Then I'd be torn ...

(Now I get to see how much Krugman I can quote before the NYT sends me a nasty-gram. I think I can stay within Fair Use pretty readily.)

How not to thrill your customers

An author of a couple of interesting OS X apps, has a blog. I wrote a (brilliant, of course) comment on the blog -- but I fumbled the captcha. When the screen redrew, my comment was gone.

I figured I'd let the fellow know of the problem, but here's what his blog has in the contact section:

...If you’d like to contact me, please send me email. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out my email address...

Yikes! This guy hasn't figured out that his blog is a part of his sales strategy ... or, in this case, his anti-sales strategy! (Name intentionally withheld.)

Deinventing government: renewing a US child's passport

A golden age can only be recognized in a rear view mirror. Once upon a time Al Gore was reinventing government, and governmental websites were often useful. Alas, in the reign of Sauron all those websites have been outsourced to the highest donor. Consider, for example, the process of renewing a child's passport.

Now, I admit this is an extreme example. A few years ago our very dim congress decided that a child's passport must prove both citizenship and also, somehow, prove that the child is related to their parents. This made the process very complex - for every renewal up to age 14 (after which the child passes into yet another intermediate process). So the process is seriously bunged up to begin with. Even so, the obscure and confusing directions manage to make a bungled process even worse.

For the benefit of anyone who ever has to do this, here's the directions for the worst case scenario (adopted children, mother kept her birth name and is thus surely a terrorist):

1. From Special Requirements for Children Under Age 14 get the forms and print them.
   
   
2. Get pictures at Kinkos. They're open all hours, and they have the right equipment. (Some post offices will do photos! The MSP Airport post office will do the picture.)
   
   
3. Find a post office that does passports. I don't know any way to find the hours they're open for this other than visiting them (!). In MSP (Minneapolis) the airport PO is open for passport processing from 9am-3pm seven days a week and it does photos as well. Other offices may be open on certain hours and days. There's usually no way to phone and discover the hours -- you have to actually make a specific visit to learn the hours.
   
   
4. You will need (for our "worst case" scenario)
   

• Child's current passport (god help you if it's expired)
• Child (in good mood)
• Those pictures from Kinkos, or done at the post office in some cases
  
• BOTH parents physically present, both with identification (I recommend carrying both drivers license AND passport for identification).
• child's certified US birth certificate (every time, you'd think they'd only need it once)
  
• just in case: adoption certificate andmarriage certificate if mother's name doesn't match the children's name. The last time we did this we weren't asked for these.

The passport office will keep the original birth certificate and last passport. We paid the extra $60 for expedited service on the theory that it might reduce the rate of document loss and processing errors. I hate surrendering original documents.

You can check the status of the passport renewal here.

Read the official site for the official list, but the above works for us. I've written my house representative -- at the very least the Post Office hours and service information should be on a web site.

Aetna: winner of this month's stupid security policy

Aetna's username policy requires a number. In the username. On the other hand, they authenticate using the same "security questions" everyone else uses. So if your account is cracked somewhere, the crooks can use your past "security" answers to get your Aetna account too -- even if they don't know your "secret" "username".

Confusing the username with the password. That's rich. Aetna wins this month's stupid security policy prize.

Router admin password: don't use the default!

If you've never set your router's admin (not the wireless pw) pw, you should do it now: Gordon's Tech: The router/javascript bug - this feels big.

Yahoo! has abandoned desktop search

That was quiet! Yahoo! has abandoned the desktop search market. Yahoo! Desktop Search now downloads from X1 -- the company that Yahoo had licensed their product from. The "additional file type" search is no longer free from Yahoo, it now requires an X1 license. (I misread the web page, it's still there!)

This was a big market a few years back, with products from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and others. I tried them all, and only Yahoo Desktop Search (X1) was worth the bother. Alas, it's gone now. Google Desktop Search is still around, but it doesn't treat folders with sufficient respect and it doesn't give me enough configuration options.

Microsoft will focus on migrating users to Vista search, and of course OS X has spotlight, so there's only the soon-t0-dwindle XP marketplace for Yahoo to work with. I presume they entered this market in the first place to try to get YDS users to use Yahoo search, but I doubt that was worth the bother. It's especially not worthwhile now that Google has won the search wars.

I may try the X1 product, though when I last tried it I was surprised to find that YDS was less buggy than X1!

Update: I'm using it now. It seems as good as always, but I think YDS might have allowed me to do network shares -- X1 doesn't without an upgrade. In any case I don't need this feature -- my network is mostly OS X.

Update 2: Actually, it's better than YDS. I don' t think YDS included Eudora indexing, but this version of X1 does. Nice!

Four decades of television: last of the rabbit ears

When it comes to television, we're a bit retro. The kids watch Netflix videos (movies and tv) on an ancient CRT, but we don't do broadcast or cable. So when my 10 yo insisted on watching the super bowl while the youngers watched the CRT I had to scramble a bit.

It worked, and I got a kick out of all the decades of technology that were trivially easy to lash together. In an era of Yet Another Proprietary Apple Connector the RCA AV plug is a shining beacon of lost hope.

In front we have a 2006 Dell desktop monitor (HDTV!). The box is a junky DVD/video player with a broken DVD player and a working TV tuner - vintage 2000. Below the table is a vintage 1990 stereo. 1950s era rabbit ears sit atop the box. Fifty years of technology all working together to create a very low end home AV system.

There won't be many more opportunities to put this mash-up together. Broadcast analog television is supposed to end in a year or so, though I personally doubt that will happen. A president may survive the greatest strategic debacle since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, but ending broadcast TV is a recipe for annihilation.

Cheap stuff that doesn't work: are we figuring this out?

I don't think Apple has particularly good quality assurance. They do, however, have an incredibly strong brand and rabid and demanding user base --- including macintouch. I can wait until the base sorts the flops from the goodies, and then buy with reasonable expectations. Sure, I can still be burned by idiotic proprietary connectors, but at least I don't buy the world's most painful phone or a dysfunctional alarm clock.

Most of the world's gizmos, however, don't come from Apple, Canon, Bose, Nikon, or any other company with a reputation to manage (are there any others?). They come from companies like SONY, Dell, and a large variety of fake brands (Zenith, etc) used by transient contract manufacturers. Some of the stuff works for a while, a heck of a lot doesn't. It mostly ends up in massive piles of toxic junk, and irretrievable hours of lost lifetime. It's a con job, and we've been unbelievably slow to catch on.

Today, though, an unlikely voice of rebellion arose within the very home of the enemy -- Gizmodo (emphases mine):

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Joel Johnson Returns...to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap - Gizmodo

....Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it...

The first step in our rehab is to restore the importance of brands with reputations. There are a few left -- buy from them. Our time is not a commodity.

More evidence of hacked wetware: the DARPP-32 gene and schizophrenia

I think humans have hacked and buggy wetware. I predict that studies underway on the frequency of autism in Ashkenazi populations will show that some of the genes underlying autism also have adaptive advantages.

In the meantime, we may be seeing this in schizophrenia: FuturePundit: Intelligence Boosting Gene Ups Schizophrenia Risk. The DARPP-32 gene provides a cognitive boost, but may also increase the risk of developing some forms of the mixed set of disorders we call "schizophrenia". This is what you see with "new" mutations that haven't been fully debugged yet.

The sooner we understand how buggy all our minds are, the sooner we'll learn wisdom, tolerance, and forgiveness.

Quantum computing: revenge of the analog

I'd assumed we were still 10 years away from a useful quantum computer. A Canadian company is now advertising one: Scientific American.com: First "Commercial" Quantum Computer Solves Sudoku Puzzles.

The experts believe this particular approach won't scale, but I'm stunned that they're already up to 16 bits. It also doesn't work do encryption tasks, so international finance can keep working. It apparently works rather like the analog computers my grad school adviser once played with. Don will be amused to learn that his analog skills are again on the cutting edge.

So, how long until we do applied counterfactual computing? Does anyone still think we can predict twenty years ahead?

The peculiar scarcity of books on quantum entanglement

I've been blogging periodically about the weirdness of a universe where quantum entanglement is real, but it was a somewhat supercilious essay in Wired magazine that convinced me I needed to read a real book ..

Wired 15.02: What We Don't Know

How do entangled particles communicate?

... In 1997, scientists separated a pair of entangled photons by shooting them through fiber-optic cables to two villages 6 miles apart. Tipping one into a particular quantum state forced the other into the opposite state less than five-trillionths of a second later, or nearly 7 million times faster than light could travel between the two [jf: probably instantaneously]. Of course, according to relativity, nothing travels faster than the speed of light - not even information between particles.

Even the best theories to explain how entanglement gets around this problem seem preposterous. One, for example, speculates that signals are shot back through time. Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving: According to a famous doctrine called Bell’s Inequality, for entanglement to square with relativity, either we have no free will or reality is an illusion. Some choice.
- Lucas Graves, New York City-based writer

I was sure I'd find a lot of books on the topic, but the best I could do was 'Schrodinger's Kittens' -- written about 13 years ago! I did find some a more recent text, but it belonged to what a Wikipedia article calls Dirac's "shut up and calculate" school [1]. The other relatively recent texts I found were either fluffy or preferred to deal with familiar topics like modern cosmology.

So what gives? Is this such a scary topic that almost no-one dares to explore what it means?

I'm write some more as I work my way through the Kittens ...

[1] Easy for Dirac to say -- he died before we were doing quantum teleportation, quantum encryption, and irrefutable entanglements.

Update 2/15/07: After finishing the last chapter of Schrodinger's Kittens I understand why Graves setup the choice of 'reality is not what we think' versus 'no free will'. The 'transactional model' preserves our familiar "reality" of time and relativity, but the handshakes between past and future seem to constrain the future. In the enhanced (Wheeler) slit model, for example, the photon assumes its wave or particle behavior as it crosses the slit based on a handshake with the future absorbed photon. The nature of the future absorbed photon however, is based upon an observer choosing whether or not to "drop the screen". Since the photon adopts its configuration before the screen is dropped, however, the observer cannot really be choosing whether or not to drop the screen. The choice must be made in a way that's consistent with the form of the photon. Gribbin tries to dodge this trap with some handwaving about micro vs. macro causality, but it's obvious his heart isn't in it.

Hmmm. I'm beginning to see why Feynman warned us about 'going down the [quantum] drain', and why there are so many books on cosmology and so few on Bell's theorem. Next thing you know I'll be ready to start believing that our universe is both simultaneously vast and unbelievably small, that all things that will happen have happened, and that time's arrow really is an illusion ...

There is an escape clause. Gribbin's framed the transactional model as being dependent upon a closed universe. We appear to live in an open (perhaps excessively open) universe (but see below). In an open universe, might we get a true arrow of time and the possibility of choice? Maybe one day, if we ever "understand it all", we'll learn that you can determine whether a universe is open or closed by testing for action-at-a-distance.

Update 3/4/07: I'm reading through Gribbin from page one, and since I'd read the last chapter first I know to watch for references to a closed universe. I've found a few, it seems that more than a few of the foundations of QM, and even QED, do assume a closed universe. I'd thought that the universe is now thought to be "open", so I wrote Professor Gribbin asking if he'd written any updates. He graciously replied:

... It is entirely possible for the Universe to be closed but with accelerating expansion! All we know for sure is it is indistinguishably close to flat, and it is probably on the closed side of flat, pushed there by inflation.

Which reminds me of my old post about the respiratory rate of the universe ...

I'll just keep on reading, reading, reading ...

Update 5/13/07: My Amazon review of Gribbin's book. Five stars, despite being 12 years old.

The end of SARS and the use of synthetic pathogens to combat epidemics

You know - SARS - the plague that was going to destroy civilization. It went away. Puzzled the heck out of me. It was supposed to recur every year or two, but it hasn't. Nobody seemed to be curious about this. Was a giant conspiracy at work?

Well, no. A quick pubmed search showed that lots of epidemiologists have been quietly puzzling about what happened, especially in China. I liked this one:

A double epidemic model for the SARS propagation (9/2003).

... We find that, in order to reconcile the existing data and the spread of the disease, it is convenient to suggest that a first milder outbreak protected against the SARS...

I particularly like it because I wrote:

I still don't understand why all hell didn't break loose then. My best guess is that there were multiple strains of SARS circulating simultaneously, and an innocuous one spread faster -- immunizing the susceptibles in advance of the killer strain.

Ok, so I put my theory out more than a year after Ng et al published a full model supporting it! I gotta work on my timing. They must have started work on their model very shortly after the epidemic had started to fizzle. I didn't blog on this thought, but my theory back then (2004, not 2003!) was the Canadian nurses got so sick because they were so good at isolation -- they prevented exposure to the benign, immunizing, coronavirus and thus suffered the full impact of the malign virus.

All of which lead to some random observations and questions:

1. This is a fascinating story that ought to appear in a popular magazine, or at least in The Economist or Scientific American. I don't recall seeing anything. There's a curious "chaotic" aspect to what gets written when. I wonder if blogs will change any of that, or if they simply amplify the current fads.

2. As a non-practicing physician who works on clinical knowledge representation I often think about the limits of the mental models I once used to care for patients. Back in the day we were taught to think of 'one infection, one disease'.

Are medical students still taught to think that way, or are physicians now taught that illness (or its absence) may be the result of a number of interacting simultaneous infections (and of course susceptibilities, treatments, phases of the moon, etc, etc)? Of course I'm not sure what one would do with such knowledge! Still, it does help make one's predictions more modest.

3. This suggests a radical, but not entirely novel, approach to a future serious epidemic. Create a contagious synthetic pathogen that's relatively benign, but induces immunity to the major pathogen -- and spread it actively. I say not entirely novel, because this is how Polio was suppressed. The oral vaccine was an active contagious pathogen that was excreted in stool. It immunized a vast number of persons -- but some became sick, disabled, or dead. When Polio was less of a threat we switched to a non-pathogenic inoculation. The difference is the successful Polio strategy was probably unintentional (I suspect some people understood even in the 1950s), but in the future we'd be deliberately exposing an entire population to an immunogenic pathogen that would almost certainly harm many people.

Oh, about that conspiracy. Somewhere in central China in 2003, a brilliant scientists realizes that she can save the world by unleashing a synthetic coronavirus she's been developing in a top-secret bioweapon facility ... The novel almost writes itself ...

2/15/07: Emily points out that this is rather like fighting a fire by setting fires -- backburning I think it's called. My son has a book on it called 'Hotshots'. A useful analogy.