The good news on global warming: not enough fuel

Dyer recently wrote of the CO2 "game of chicken" -- China and India vs. the post-industrial world in a race to see who can fry the world first.

FuturePundit (warning, he is irrational about global warming) posts a more optimistic view -- we can't fry the world because we don't have enough coal. His writing is referring to this blog post. If you buy this argument we can only roast the world a bit.

That's the most optimistic thing I've read all week. Of course I suspect it's not true, but one can dream ...

Why the Iraq war is a great thing for America

No, really. It's great. George Bush is a strategic genius, a farsighted visionary far beyond anything the world has seen before.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Millions have suffered terribly. Over 30,000 allied solders will have significant lifelong disability. Thousands are dead. A trillion dollars has been vaporized. America's shame will live a hundred years. The middle east's problems are even less tractable than they were 10 years ago. Pakistan may yet collapse, becoming an arms dealer for nuclear terrorists (ok, so that would be particularly bad).

All this, thanks to George Bush.

And, yet, this would be much worse. If the fiasco, the horror, of the Iraq war makes America more cautious, less strident, wiser ... then we may avoid war with China. If we avoid war with China, future historians may decide that Bush's fiasco was a good thing for America and for most of the world, excepting, perhaps, Iraq.

Update 7/4/07: James Fallows makes a similar point from a different angle. Brrrr. There are worse fates.

Apple victorious

I've been reading the iPhone reviews. Grumpy geek iPhone fans like Coding Horror say to wait for 3G support and a few more physical buttons next year. More desperate sorts, less enamored of Microsoft's solutions, say to wait at least until this fall. Maybe then we'll have search, cut and paste, tasks, better synchronization, an external keyboard, disk mode, fewer crashes, etc.

No matter. This review, late to the game, sums it up best. It's quite possible, if AT&T can hold itself together, and if the phone crashes no more than once every few days (with no data loss), that Apple has won. They've put a serious OS, with serious multimedia and network capabilities, on a phone with serious graphics capabilities. They've established a cross-platform distribution mechanism (iTunes) for updates, software, backups, media retail, etc. They're allied with Google (for now).

Does Apple want to raise a few millions? Sell a "task" add-on for $20 a pop. Does Apple want to raise a few hundred million? Sell games.

You did notice that Apple now has a handheld gaming platform, didn't you? (With an accelerometer too.)

It's great news for Apple stakeholders and, in the near term, it's good news for AT&T. More importantly, it's fantastic news for the decaying American mobile phone industry. There will be a desperate scramble by AT&T's competitors to deliver better products faster, and the handset manufacturer will get whatever they want. And once the 3G iPhones start appearing overseas ...

Did I mention that Minneapolis is putting in metro-wide 802.11? The iPhone will work quite nicely there, including the VOIP services Jobs is promising.

Anyone who has a mobile phone number should be very grateful that Apple, it seems, has delivered.

7/2/07: Yes, victory indeed. When a US mobile phone stokes anxiety in Korean manufacturers, something radical has happened. It's bit like Brazil suddenly launching a star ship.

7/2/07: More proof. I really didn't think Apple could do it out of the gate.

Race returns as ancestry, this time with better brains from China

A few years ago race was on the ropes, but it's back and looking as though it will persist, though possibly with a new name. The base "genetic clusters" (races) are:

• Africans
• Australian aborigines
• East Asians
• American Indians
• Caucasians (Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent)

(The "genetic cluster" breakdown in the graphic that accompanies the article is incomplete, the above list was taken from the article)

Not only is race back, but so are race-specific mutations affecting brain development. DAB1 is said to be "Chinese only", but I suspect the researchers are using "Chinese" as a proxy for "east asian". Anyway, the mutation sounds suspiciously like an upgrade:

Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally - New York Times

Another puzzle is presented by selected genes involved in brain function, which occur in different populations and could presumably be responses to behavioral challenges encountered since people left the ancestral homeland in Africa.

But some genes have more than one role, and some of these brain-related genes could have been selected for other properties.

Two years ago, Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, reported finding signatures of selection in two brain-related genes of a type known as microcephalins, because when mutated, people are born with very small brains. Two of the microcephalins had come under selection in Europeans and one in Chinese, Dr. Lahn reported.

He suggested that the selected forms of the gene had helped improved cognitive capacity and that many other genes, yet to be identified, would turn out to have done the same in these and other populations.

Neither microcephalin gene turned up in Dr. Pritchard’s or Dr. Williamson’s list of selected genes, and other researchers have disputed Dr. Lahn’s claims. Dr. Pritchard found that two other microcephalin genes were under selection, one in Africans and the other in Europeans and East Asians.

Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.

Variants of two genes involved in hearing have become universal, one in Chinese, the other in Europeans...

... A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians, a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent. The clusterings reflect “serial founder effects,” Dr. Feldman said, meaning that as people migrated around the world, each new population carried away just part of the genetic variation in the one it was derived from...

... The concept of race as having a biological basis is controversial, and most geneticists are reluctant to describe it that way. But some say the genetic clustering into continent-based groups does correspond roughly to the popular conception of racial groups....

... David Reich, a population geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, said that the term “race” was scientifically inexact and that he preferred “ancestry"...

Ethnicity reflects your cultural identity, so that word is clear enough. I think "ancestry" is too vague -- Japanese and Koreans may feel they have very different "ancestry" (and in a sense they do), but they're not two "races". I think we're stuck with race for now.

So what year will we start tweaking human brains with the "best" (heh, heh) upgrades? I'm guessing 2040, because it will probably be pretty hard to get right.

Friedman on the "transparent society" (without mention of Brin)

Friedman, a celebrity whose reputation has cruelly fallen, writes about the implications of global reputations ... 

The Whole World Is Watching - Friedman -New York Times

... When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer — and each of us so much more transparent.

The implications of all this are the subject of a new book by Dov Seidman, founder and C.E.O. of LRN, a business ethics company. His book is simply called “How.”..

Alas, Friedman is not much of a reader or a researcher, otherwise he'd know of David Brin's 1999 book, The Transparent Society. Friedman, presumably recycling Seidman, predicts youngsters of today will have to carefully manage their public actions from now through adulthood, avoiding any smirch on their record that would impair their future promotion path. So predictable. He doesn't even manage to mention that the vast majority of human history has been lived in small communities where reputations were as robust as memory.

If Friedman were to open his mind a wee bit, he'd take in a bit of science fiction. Reputation management has been a recurring theme of the genre for at least 20 years. There are many alternate paths, including identity obscuration (create false paths to confuse the story, an application of fraud techniques to blur recollection), identity fraud, and tools and methodologies to support the creation of multiple transient identities. In some paths one's "True Name" is guarded as closely as in LeGuin's fantasy novels, while alternate identities are juggled throughout life. Or, most likely of all, we'll only have to worry about any of this stuff for the short period of time in which our everyday environment is even marginally comprehensible to our feeble primate brains.

Incidentally, the relationship between John Gordon and me will become one degree more obscure sometime in the next few weeks....

Four new Dyer essays

Dyer 2007

June 14 The Islamic Republic of Gaza
June 18 Kosovo and the Law
June 21 China's Shoes
June 23 The Middle East After Iraq

Some points of interest from this series:

• In 2006 China emitted 8% more CO2 than the US
• Cement and coal are the two reasons China puts out far more CO2 per capita than it should
• China, India and the US are playing a monstrous game of "chicken" on CO2 emissions
• Dyer on Israel's future: "Israel faces another generation of confrontation and quite possibly of war, and the Palestinians face another generation of military occupation. Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new kind of oppression. It is a mess, and it's too late to fix it.
• Dyer is as pessimistic about Kosovo as he is about Israel, and he regrets ever supporting the US attack on Serbia. He sees it as a "precedent" for the invasion of Iraq. I think he's overestimating how much "precedent" Cheney/Bush needed.

Of the four essays the China one is by far the best and the Kosovo essay the weakest.

What if modern finance doesn't know how to price mortgage derivatives?

DeLong reassures us that there will be vast transfers of money between winners and losers, but that this won't cause systemic disruption:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: CDOs: Mark-to-Model and Donner-Party Economics

[quoting from the Finacial Times:]

...Until recently, when late payments and defaults on these mortgages spiked higher, the problem drew little attention. This was because, through the magic of so-called structured finance, risky assets such as subprime mortgages could be packaged into attractive investment products. These elaborately constructed securities, called collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), are designed to yield juicy returns while also carrying high credit ratings. They have proved popular with hedge funds as well as with longer-term investors such as pension funds and insurance companies, many of which have bought billions of dollars of such securities in recent years – thus providing the liquidity that was then channelled into mortgage loans.

But heavy losses incurred at the two Bear Stearns hedge funds as a result of such financial haute couture have prompted fears that the CDO emperor may turn out to have no clothes. Such a revelation could threaten the value of investor portfolios around the globe – not just in the mortgage sector but in the way many sorts of company fund themselves. This is because unlike stocks listed on an exchange or US Treasury bonds, CDOs are rarely traded. Indeed, a distinct irony of the 21st-century financial world is that, while many bankers hail them as the epitome of modern capitalism, many of these new-fangled instruments have never been priced through market trading...

We all hope Brad is right. All the same, it's good to have a working theory to explain what may happen soon ...

DeLong on the Wall Street Journal's bizarre editorial pages

I didn't sign up for the WSJ Online because I didn't want to send any coins to anyone involved with the WSJ's editorial pages. They editorial page has been barking mad for years, and the op-ed page has been merely perverse, irrational, and wacky. Imagine my surprise when DeLong tells us that Journal insiders have the same opinion of the editorial pages ...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Dr. Dow-Jones and Mr. Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch

...Some Journal insiders--even some on the news side--say that this Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship is all to the advantage of the good Dr. Jekyll. Nobody serious believes the editorial page, they say; it serves as a comics page for the older and more-wingnutty subscribers, a source of daily comfort food for those who still denounce, "that Communist, Franklin Roosevelt," and who have always thought that the depth and duration of the Great Depression were the fault of the New Deal--that if the free-market tidal wave of falling wages and massive bankruptcies had been allowed to purge the economy for 1933 and 1934, by 1935 and 1936 all would have been well. But, this faction says, the editorial page delivers up perhaps half a million extra subscribers a year, and that money flow pays for the finest news-reporting operation in the world.

Other Journal insiders say that it is the bad Mr. Hyde that is sucking the blood of Dr. Jekyll. Nobody would pay attention to the wingnuts of the editorial page, they say, were it not for the fact that they come at the back of a very, very good newspaper. 50,000 people a month read the American Spectator, where Bartley's crew belongs. 1,000,000 people a day at least glance at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The reporters in the news division are thus in a morally ambiguous position as journalists: the stories they write inform the public, and the public they attract then turns to page A16--and is there misinformed...

I think the "blood sucker" segment is right. The WSJ editorial pages are a font of material for the certainly not-stupid but definitely barking mad wingnuts that generate AM talk radio. It's a malign influence that does far greater damage than the good done by the news page. If Murdoch ends up destroying the news pages, he'll have done us all a favor. If he ends up moderating the editorial pages, that's good too. If he does some of both then the outcome is harder to judge ...

Progress is not progressive: the Apple Newton to Palm to iPhone

In honor of the iPhone launch, The Reg has a brief informed review of the Apple's Newton. The only comments I'd add is that $600 in 1993 is about $800 now (inflation adjusted) and that in addition to having workable handwriting recognition the PalmPilot was less about 1/4 the price and 1/3 the size and weight of the Newton. The original PalmPilot was pocketable, affordable, rugged, ultra-reliable, and extremely responsive -- attributes that have been neglected since.

The most interesting part of this essay, however, is that it illustrates a principal that geeks like me, and inventors in general, struggle with on a regular basis. "Progress" is not always progressive. Key functionality can go away, and not return for decades.

The capabilities of the Newton were not only advanced for their day, they are advanced fourteen years later. Yes, in the better part of two decades, moving on to one-fifth of a century, we have not equaled the capabilities of the Newton. In particular, the ways we manage structured data and data relationships has barely changed from the 1980s; the Newton was an attempt at a far more sophisticated approach.

Of course computer scientists know all about this. Hint - never mention Smalltalk (1971) or LISP (1958, the latter inspired parts of the NetwonOS) to one of them. Geeks of a certain generation still bemoan the death of MORE 3.1, GrandView, Agenda, etc. My Samsung i500 had numerous data-oriented capabilities that the iPhone lacks. Nothing syncs with a desktop as well as the original Palm (because one company owned both ends of the sync transaction and, unlike Microsoft, built them together) and no handwriting input environment works as well as Graffiti One.

The sad truth is that what people like me want and need is not what the mass market wants and needs. The Newton was built for me, but, as some point out, that's wee bit of a small market. The Palm was built for me, but that turned out to be a small market after all. And so on.

And so we make do. Even if Apple never adds anything to the iPhone* I'll eventually give up on a vast amount of current capability and adapt to the tools that are available and supported -- even when that's a step backwards.

Bitter lessons!

* I'm hoping they omitted search because they couldn't fit Spotlight into their currently available footprint, cut and paste because something went wrong at the last minute, and task management because they want to sell a "pro" product for more money. I know, I'm pathetic.

Web (ASP) 2.0 applications: still not reliable enough

I use quite a bit of software on diverse networks and multiple platforms, including OS X, XP, GoogleOS, Yahoo, web 2.0, etc. Some is extraordinary (Windows Live Writer, Gmail), some is very good (Nisus Writer Express, Microsoft Excel, Google Maps, Google Earth, iPhoto 6), some is mediocre (Office 2007, Blogger 2.0*, Aperture) and some is miserable (Microsoft Word, Blogger 1.0, iPhoto 1-4).

Google Docs & Spreadsheets fits into the mediocre category. When it works it works well, but too often it's slow or even unresponsive. That's barely tolerable in an email application, but it's unforgivable in a spreadsheet or  wordprocessor. Google Docs and Spreadsheets only works for me in non-critical settings where there's a very strong need for document sharing and collaboration [1].

In the 1990s we thought we'd have a reliable high speed network infrastructure with low latency by the year 2001. Obviously that didn't happen. Technology has moved slowly, US markets have moved slowly, and a high level of "pollution" and "violence" on the net have reduced reliability even when the underlying technology has improved.

I think the death of the client application and locally resident data has been prematurely announced. The network isn't there yet, it may not get there for decades. Put me down as a "web 2.0" (once known as "application service provider") skeptic.

It's time to go back to paying for traditional locally resident software applications. Network data synchronization and file sharing - of course. Wide area network thin client - no.

* Google could make the BlogThis! bookmarklet functionality far better for me if they made it into a "submit draft then open post in Blogger editor" tool, but of course I'm a market of one. Blogger 1.0 was in the "miserable" category, so they've moved up.

[1] The cut and paste chaos on OS X is technically a platform problem, but it's a leading indicator of how immature these products are even when the network functions properly.

Google moment: St. Jean Baptiste Day, Lachine canal, Picasa, map photo, Google Earth ...

Update 9/2/07: Alas for my enthusiasm, Google's Picasa image integration with both Google Maps and Google Earth doesn't work the way I'd thought it did. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, I can't find any documentation. The one thing I see is that all images are not routinely available to the public even when the appropriate layers are enabled. As of 9/07 image display in Google Maps seems to barely work at all.

--
Forget the feeble iPhone 1.0*, Google's latest delivery is much more interesting.

Picasa web album has "map integration". It's a bit shaky in parts, and it would work better with a 32" display, but it's already pretty stunning. You can assign a public album or an individual public image to a Google Maps location through one of two methods. The snazziest method is dragging and dropping from an image palette onto a hybrid map view, but to make that one work smoothly you need either dual monitors with two views of the album or meaningful image labels.

A few minutes after you assign images to locations, the knowledge propagates to Google Earth. A KML link appears to the right of the album, and now you can click there to see the newly added images appear in the context of Google Earth [1]. Visitors to your album can presumably also see the images in the context of Google Earth or use the "map view" of the album.

Google introduced this new feature within the past few days, and coincidentally I had a perfect test album. This is unusual, since my photo albums are almost entirely private (kid pics). In this case a visit to my parents in Montreal fell on Quebec's national/provincial holiday/party -- St. Jean Baptiste day. I couldn't resist the opportunity to skate from their home in the west end (last refuge of the last of the old anglos) to vieux montreal, along Montreal's fabulous Lachine Canal linear park and extended bike/skate trail. As I skated beside the old canal I snapped pictures from my pocket Canon, sometimes while gliding. Artistic they aren't, but they are naturally geocentric. It was relatively easy to place them, and perhaps they'll be of interest to virtual tourists. (Incidentally, one of the most remarkable novelties for an ex-Montrealer of a certain age is that almost nobody was smoking. Incroyable.)

Obviously we want a GPS in our cameras so the photo/location relationships are built automatically. In the meantime, this is an easy way for interested persons to contribute to the development of Skynet's Google's world domination [2]. Having gone through this exercise once I'll know next time to take some pictures of stores, public monuments, and street signs, allowing much faster drag and drop geo-location.

Thanks Google, you're helping me get over my iPhone sorrows*.

* No cut and paste. Can't use MP3 as ring tone (even my despised RAZR allows that!). No search anywhere save within a web page. No external keyboard. No tasks...

[1] In OS X clicking may create a desktop shortcut which will launch Google Earth or it may launch Google Earth. It depends on your browser and security settings.
[2] I'm ready for the Google phone now ... I bet it will have search ...

Limits to understanding: evolved circuits, the genetic code, and the mind

DI has a fascinating review of recent research on hardware evolution. The implications are obviously relevant to a recent article in The Economist on the multidimensional/network encoding of genetic information (see also NYT on encoding meaning in topology), and on attempts to understand cognition.

Damn Interesting - On the Origin of Circuits

...Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.

It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip's operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method– most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors' absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white...

I've written before about my teenage experience with modeling the evolved and emergent pneumatic braking system of a 20th century freight train. Evolved systems are characteristically very hard for an evolved mind to interpret. Meaning can be encoded in a baroque and illogical fashion, expressed across multiple continuous and undefined "surfaces" of representation. It may be fundamentally impossible for a mind to truly "understand" it's mechanisms, even if we are able ultimately to create another mind on a much more "reasoned" substrate.

If we eventually discover that the world of physics is fundamentally more like an evolved than a designed system, then we shall mourn the lost innocence of ambitious comprehension ...

Theory of the surge

Phil Carter points to an essay by General Petraeus's (aka the geek general) military anthropologist explaining their counterinsurgency strategy:

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq (SWJ Blog)

.... The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. (The enemy is fluid because he has no permanent installations he needs to defend, and can always run away to fight another day. But the population is fixed, because people are tied to their homes, businesses, farms, tribal areas, relatives etc). Therefore—and this is the major change in our strategy this year—protecting and controlling the population is do-able, but destroying the enemy is not. We can drive him off from the population, then introduce local security forces, population control, and economic and political development, and thereby 'hard-wire' the enemy out of the environment, preventing his return. But chasing enemy cells around the countryside is not only a waste of time, it is precisely the sort of action he wants to provoke us into. That’s why AQ cells leaving an area are not the main game—they are a distraction....

If Bush said it was raining, I'd leave my umbrella at home. Petraeus though ...

CV reviews the mutual constraints of cosmology and particle physics

A delightful post for amateur physics junkies: Constraints and Signatures in Particle Cosmology | Cosmic Variance. CV reviews the constraints cosmology places on modeling particle physics, and conversely suggests some cosmologic puzzles that might inspire new particle physics. This one was knew to me:

... There are a number of hints that the highest energy cosmic rays may require exotic new physics for a complete understanding. Above a certain energy (the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff), particles from cosmological distances shouldn’t reach us at all, because they would scatter off the CMB. This has led people to speculate that any ultra high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) may be a signature of new particle physics. Does your theory contain any particles or phenomena that could allow this to happen, and what spectrum of UHECRs should we expect? Some of those topological defects I mentioned above may be an example...

"Topological defects". A rather significant hint I'd say. Mark is referring to:

... Does your theory contain any new topological defects, such as monopoles, domain walls or cosmic strings? If the vacuum structure of your particle physics theory is sufficiently topologically complex, then any symmetry breakings that occur may lead to trapped regions of false vacuum that cannot decay. If so, then many of the constraints mentioned for long-lived elementary particles may apply to these objects. In addition, some topological defects can form networks that redshift more slowly then matter, coming to dominate at a later time in the universe, or can generate a spectrum of gravitational radiation that is in conflict with our detailed measurements of the timing of the millisecond pulsar. If this last constraint is a problem, then it is also possible that the defects unacceptably distort the spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB)...

Keep your eyes open for wandering wrinkles in space-time. Should you happen upon one, email Mark at "once" ...

NYT Massive Evolution Science Section

Science News 6/26/07- New York Times. It will take a while to get through ALL of this. Wow, the NYT is having a great year.