The case of the disappearing Amazon reviews

In at least one case, a good number of Amazon reviews have gone missing: 

Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » The case of the disappearing Amazon reviews

...As of about three weeks ago, we had 33 reviews posted. Most were positive, a handful were negative; either way, each one meant that some reader cared enough to take the time to post their reactions, and that meant a lot to me.

Then something weird happened about ten days ago. Suddenly, Amazon showed only 10 reviews. Two dozen reviews posted between mid-February and the end of June had simply disappeared. In the time since then, a couple of new reviews have joined the total, but the missing reviews have not reappeared...

Disappeared without explanation or even recognition. User reviews constitute a large portion of Amazon's value, if Amazon is not treating them wisely their investors need to wake up.

In addition to an example of a worrisome behavior by Amazon (reminds me of a Sprint cell phone review I had to rewrite six times to sneak by the cell phone company's Amazonian censors), this is an example of the general principle that one should own one's own data. When I write reviews I first publish them here, then submit them to Amazon as well. At the least, the data will stay on my blog.

Speaking of nefarious tricks and reviews, has anyone noted that some hardware vendors are now revising "model numbers" (Hint: HP) every few weeks? It's almost as though they're trying to escape from Amazon's reviews ...

Google maps: more exciting developments

I was thrilled by Google's integration of 'My Maps' and Google/Picasa's web albums. Commentators who think Google's only success is search are ignoring Google Maps and Gmail, both of which are steadily consuming market share (ex: Google Maps):

Google Inc. to unite mapping mashups - Yahoo! News

... Google has been steadily gaining ground in recent months. In June, Google's maps attracted 28.9 million U.S. visitors, a 28 percent increase from the same time last year, Media Metrix said. Meanwhile, Yahoo's mapping traffic fell 12 percent to 29.6 million visitors. Mapquest continued to hold a comfortable lead with 53.9 million visitors, a 3 percent increase from last year.
[jg: See update re: Mapquest ..]

Now Google is taking this to the next level:

Google Inc. to unite mapping mashups - Yahoo! News

... Google introduced My Maps in April to give users a way to save and share their own mashups.

Now, users with Google log-ins will be able to pick from more than 100 mapplets to customize and save their own maps. Google expects the number of mapplets to increase as word about the service spreads. To encourage the phenomenon, Google's own engineers also contributed mapplets...

All of which, we can expect, will work on the iPhone. By the way [1].

[1] There is supposedly no GPS in iPhone 1.0 Apple has come up with some semi-reasonable workarounds. I wonder why they couldn't do it ...

Update: I had the impression Mapquest sent money back to companies that included their services and I commented on that, but "NoTime4Foolz" corrected me (see comments):

Actually, companies pay Mapquest to use their maps. They have a business solutions group that sells enterprise software. Outside of those clients, they have market share because they're still excellent. Not as pretty as Google's maps in some cases, but dependable, easy to use, and accurate.

The Hutter prize: AI pattern recognition developed through compression algorithm tests

To parse out the Slashdot | Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold story, first read the Wikipedia article on the Hutter prize. That's the real story.

In essence, pattern recognition (search) has always been thought to be a key skill for any mind, biologic or abiologic. Pattern recognition is also a key component of compression algorithms (most people are familiar with .zip, .tiff, .jpg and other kinds of compressed files). The Hutter prize funders want to advance AI development (Google preserve us from well intended fools!), so they fund efforts to improve pattern recognition technology by awarding prizes for compression algorithms. (Incidentally, "prizes" as incentives were big in the 19th century and have made a come back in the past 10 years.)

The latest attempt to win the Hutter prize was the subject of the slashdot article. It suggests that this particular skill is close to the theoretic optimum - for text:

Slashdot | Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold

Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character. Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12 [rar file]...

and from a later comment suggesting the text optimum may be misleading:

... Compression is about recognizing patterns. Once you have a pattern, you can substitute that pattern with a smaller pattern and a lookup table. Pattern recognition is a primary branch of AI, and is something that actual intelligences are currently much better at.

We can generally show this is true by applying the "grad student algorithm" to compression - i.e., lock a grad student in a room for a week and tell him he can't come out until he gets optimum compression on some data (with breaks for pizza and bathroom), and present the resulting compressed data at the end. So far this beats out compression produced by a compression program because people are exceedingly clever at finding patterns.

Of course, while this is somewhat interesting in text, it's a lot more interesting in images, and more interesting still in video. You can do a lot better with those by actually having some concept of objects - with a model of the world, essentially, than you can without. With text you can cheat - exploiting patterns that come up because of the nature of the language rather than because of the semantics of the situation. In other words, your text compressor can be quite "stupid" in the way it finds patterns and still get a result rivaling a human.

Waiting for the PDA version of the iPhone

 This was the first report I've read by someone who's actually looked at how well sync (doesn't) work on iPhone 1.0:

Macintouch iPhone report : Scott Mesch

... the iPhone does sync your calendar and address book, but only to a limited extent. It syncs the note field of each contact but only up to the first 256 characters or so. After that, it truncates all the rest of the notes. You also cannot search your contacts or notes. There is no To Do/Task list capability...

256 characters? That's so DOS 1.0.

Scott and I are out of step with the iPhone's market. In truth, the iPhone is far inferior to my obsolete Samsung i500 for the things I need to do. On the other hand, the i500 is gone and the iPhone has a future. So the world goes.

I'll be happier without my 450 Task items anyway - they only depress me. I'll just go back to writing on my forearm. And who cares about contacts when one has an iPhone to talk to ...

Bring in the lawyers: the sharks circle Menu Foods

Once upon a time, I was a champion of tort reform. I am, after all, a physician. I was a country doc for years, and I lived in fear of the trauma of medical liability litigation. It is a corrosive and nasty fear. The axe falls where it will, and the destruction is great.

Alas, I have followed the entropic path of all wounded romantics into a regretful accommodation with the limits of human nature. We may yet develop an alternative to the erratic and often unjust vagaries of medical malpractice litigation, but it will take a long, long time for reasons too complex to fully describe here. (In brief, health care is not a market operation, but even if it were we'd run into the same problems as described below.)

In the world of corporate behavior, however, the choice is easy. Americans have chosen, for six years now, to dismantle the protection of government. Libertarian theory tells us the "market" should replace that protection, but that theory depends on the rational choice of consumers who are completely overwhelmed and increasingly sheep-like. That leaves us with the lawyers.

This is from a lawyer sponsored web site, a site devoted to Melamine litigation that's essential to protecting not only the health of our pets, but also the health of our children:

More Court Dates on the Menu, in the Wake of Menu Foods Recall

Trenton, NJ: In the aftermath of the huge Menu Foods pet food recall this past spring, the New Jersey state legislature is considering joining two other states - Illinois and Tennessee - in granting pet owners the right to sue for loss of companionship and reasons other than economic loss - and to claim damages up to a specific cap.

The legislation differs from current civil law statutes, which limit pet owners to the right to litigate for economic damages only.

Neil Cohen, the Assembly Deputy Speaker, introduced the Bill in the New Jersey State assembly after finding several brands of the recalled pet food still on store shelves in New Jersey.
About 100 brands of pet food manufactured by Menu Foods of Canada were ordered recalled back in March after the food was found to be contaminated with melamine, an industrial binding agent that's toxic to animals and can result in kidney failure. Scores of treasured pets were sickened, and many died after eating contaminated pet food.

Under U.S. law, pets are classified as property, and while there are provisions for criminal charges if a pet is abused, current civil law only allows pet owners the right to sue for economic damages if a pet is harmed, or dies.

The new legislation, if enacted in New Jersey as it has in Tennessee and Illinois, would grant plaintiffs the right to sue pet food manufacturers, producers or distributors of adulterated pet foods, or any other person or persons who might have contributed to the contamination that may have caused, or led to a pet's illness or death.

The proposed Bill would also clear the way for compensation over loss of companionship, costs of veterinary care, training, and any other unique value the pet may have had. A show dog, for example.

A cap of $15,000 would be placed on total damages payable.

According to an article published this month in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, pet owners have been in for a rude awakening when they discover just how low animals - including pets - are positioned in the eyes of the law. Pets have been shown to contribute high value to their owners overall, and a unique value in certain circumstances. There has been a push to reflect that value in legislation.

Therapy dogs, for example, are known to represent a source of real comfort to sick, frail or elderly patients. Guide dogs are yet another example of animals which perform a valued service.

Currently, there are at least 50 class-action lawsuits filed against Menu Foods, and there may be more given the scope of the recall, and the number of pet owners affected. In the beginning of June the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed more than 4,000 reports of pet deaths in the wake of the Menu Foods recall, and the FDA is currently in the process of wading through a backlog of 21,000 calls...

...Veterinary associations oppose the idea of non-economic rewards for pet injury or death; the American Veterinary Medical Association, for one, fears that the proposed New Jersey legislation will drive up the costs of veterinary care, and could lead to frivolous lawsuits.

While Cohen's bill was motivated by the tainted pet food recall and targets that specific circumstance, some like the New Jersey Veterinary Medical Association feel that the legislation could open the door for other loss-of-companionship lawsuits, such as vaccine reaction or an unsuccessful surgery. Time will tell.

However, as pet owners continue to challenge existing laws which place their pets no higher up the importance scale than a coffee table, and as more States bring in legislation clearing the way for the right to seek non-economic damages, the pets will finally have their day in court...

Menu Foods Legal Help

If your pet has suffered or died as a result of eating any of these pet foods, please contact a lawyer involved in a possible [Menu Foods Lawsuit] who will review your case at no cost or obligation.

It will drive up the cost of veterinary care, but more significantly it will inflict a lot of the anxiety upon vets that physicians no. It will also, I suspect, significantly improve the quality of veterinary care -- which is not always what it could be. Alas, in our imperfect world, we need the lawyers. We need Menu Foods to go down in flames, and we need the lawyers to attack across a wide range of American industry.

I wish it were not so.

Dogma: Science, Religion and Perpetual Motion

I'd not paid much attention to the recent puzzling interest in a perpetual motion/free energy device, but it turns out the puzzle has two interesting pieces.

One is that if you want to get lots of attention for having very unlikely beliefs, you need only take out a full page ad in The Economist. That sinking ship (recently flattering Romney?!) can still command attention.

The more interesting bit is the opportunity to discuss the alleged distinction between dogma in religion and science. A BBC editorial, by a titled academic engineer no less, has written a gentle review of what is overwhelmingly likely to be delusional thinking (emphases mine):

BBC NEWS | Technology | The perpetual myth of free energy
Professor Sir Eric Ash is an electrical engineer. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

... The most recent attempt is from Mr Sean McCarthy, the Chief Executive Officer of an Irish company called Steorn.

His invention, known as the "Orbo", is a mechanical device which uses powerful magnets on the rim of a rotor and further magnets on an outer shell.

Mr McCarthy is convinced that it is working. He took a full page advertisement in the Economist last year to say so, and to attract volunteer scientists to check the authenticity of his claims...

... Mr McCarthy appreciates that if the device really works it is in contradiction of the law of conservation of energy, which he sees as a dogma of science...

... There is an implied reference to religious dogmas, and it is just here that one can see the source of the misunderstanding.

Most religions feature a multiplicity of dogmas.

A person who is an adherent of that religion may not necessarily believe each and every one of the dogmas. Beliefs cannot of course be chosen a la carte - but there is a degree of flexibility which can accommodate quite significant differences.

The law of conservation of energy is not like this.

It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant, although it may change forms, into heat or kinetic energy for example.

In short, law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Denying its validity would undermine not just little bits of science - the whole edifice would be no more. All of the technology on which we built the modern world would lie in ruins.

There is no flexibility in the acceptance of the law as true - at all times, and in all circumstances.

It is the failure to appreciate the difference between this scientific law and a law of religion or of society which is why we know - without having to examine details of a particular device - that Orbo cannot work.

... Mr McCarthy kindly agreed to see me.

He is a very friendly person aged just over 40, trained originally as a mechanical engineer.

He has also worked in software engineering and on control systems for the oil industry.

He came across his invention by chance whilst developing an independent power system for CCTV cameras. The company, founded in 2000 and supported privately, is now wholly devoted to developing Orbo.

When asked about the conservation of energy Mr McCarthy says quite frankly that he does not know where the energy that provides perpetual motion comes from. He wonders whether he is somehow harnessing so-called "zero point" energy, a type of residual energy found in a system and first proposed by Einstein.

Zero point energy is the lowest possible energy a system can have and therefore cannot be removed.

He also points out that cosmologists believe in the presence of dark matter and dark energy. Might they somehow help his cause?

I believe that Mr McCarthy is truly convinced of the validity of his invention. It is, in my view, a case of prolonged self deception.

I ended our conversation by giving totally unsolicited advice: to drop Orbo and get back to software engineering.

It would not have been unreasonable had he then grabbed me by the collar and thrown me out of the window. He did none of these things and was totally genial.

Might I have convinced him? I do hope so.

The science/religion distinction here is perhaps not as clear as Ash suggests. I McCarthy were right, would science and technology collapse so completely? Is the religious impulse qualitative more resistant to dogmatic transformation?

It is true that religion survives shifts in core dogmas that seem rather large. For example, on can dispense with the "trinity" and still be Christian (but not Catholic). On the other hand, if one dispensed with the entire concept of deity altogether, would religion survive?

I think religion would survive the loss of deity. Not all religions have deities; some forms of Buddhism do not (some make "the" Buddha into a de facto deity).

Similarly, I think science would survive the loss of the principle of the conservation of energy. Maybe we'd decide that we're running in a simulation (this is the logical equivalent of religious belief, but from a different angle) and adjust to that. Or maybe we'd decide energy can leak across Branes (a favorite of science fiction writers). Or maybe we'd simply recognize that cosmologists are trying to figure out where the universe "came from", which suggest at least a minor tweak to the simple understanding of the "law" of the conservation of energy (also the definition of entropy and the arrow of time, btw).

I don't think we can distinguish between science and religion on the basis of dogma, I think it plays qualitatively similar roles in both domains. I do think one can make a rough distinction in terms of principles of "disproof" and the role of replicable experiments, though the border certainly gets fuzzy at the extremes of physics (incidentally, natural selection is pretty robustly in the science camp; the anti-secularists are wasting their powder on biology, they should stick with physics).

So I'd bet every penny my family has that McCarthy is wrong about his machine, but I think Ash is wrong about the dogma distinction.

Which bring us to the last question. How did McCarthy, who was a mechanical engineer, fall into the mystical trap of perpetual motion? I think that leads us to the nature of belief and delusion in the human mind; I suspect if he did not have pre-existing tendencies to peculiar beliefs that he may be suffering the entropic decay that entraps us all, sooner or later. There's no escape, yet, from the trinity of thermodynamics.

NYT Editorial Page - Start the retreat from Iraq

If Bush and Cheney were to resign tomorrow, and if they were to miraculously be replaced by a GOP leader with any brains (do any exist any more?), then it would be easier to argue that General Petraeus should be listened to, and perhaps given more time.

But they aren't going to resign. Even impeachment of the two of them wouldn't make any difference -- it would take too long.

Given the record of Bush and Cheney, we have to assume continued incompetence. Petraeus, no matter how talented, cannot overcome truly incompetent political leadership.

So I cannot come up with an argument to rebut the position of the New York Times this Sunday:

The Road Home - New York Times Editorial

July 8, 2007

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit....

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

The Mechanics of Withdrawal

The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.

Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now...

The editorial writers then bravely attempt to suggest that the post-withdrawal chaos can be altered by American action. They are not persuasive. Bush. Cheney and all their voters are the fathers of a historic disaster.

The meaning of the Greenland DNA discovery

I've read some immensely confused responses to the discovery of ancient ice layers beneath the more modern Greenland ice. The usual whackos seem to think this somehow changes global warming models, but the real climate discovery is not that Greenland was once warm and largely ice free -- we knew that already. The real climate discovery is that even during periods of moderate to strong global warming the ice doesn't necessarily melt. That finding decreases the probability of large sea level rise over the next 50 years, and it reinforces the projections for a moderate rise that came from the recent UN climate consensus statement.

In other words, it strengthens the consensus climate models.

The non-climate discovery is of very old DNA, which will be very interesting indeed. The Boston Globe coverage is better than most, but it's better as edited below (honest!). Emphases mine:

Greenland ice yields hope on climate - The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
DNA hints warm era didn't melt entire cap
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff | July 6, 2007

An international team of scientists, drilling deep into the ice layers of Greenland, has found DNA from ancient spiders and trees, evidence that suggests the frozen shield covering the immense island survived the earth's last period of global warming.

The findings, published today in the journal Science, indicate Greenland's ice may be less susceptible to the massive meltdown predicted by computer models of climate change, the article's main author said in an interview...

....the discovery of organic matter in ice dating from half-a-million years ago offers evidence that the Greenland ice shield remained frozen even during the earth's last "interglacial period" -- some 120,000 years ago -- when average temperatures were 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are now. That's slightly higher than the average temperatures foreseen by most scientists for the end of this century, although some environmentalists warn it might get even hotter.

... "We should remain very worried about rising sea levels," he said. "We know that during the last interglacial, sea levels rose by 5 meters or more. But this must have come from sources additional to Greenland, such as Antarctic ice. It does not appear the whole [Greenland] sheet will melt."

.... Some scientists not involved in the study drew a conclusion very different from that of the Danish-led team .

"The raw results of this study are very impressive -- southern Greenland was unglaciated sometime during the last million years or so," said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist with National Aeronautics and Space Administration 's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "I would argue that this implies a more unstable ice sheet, not the opposite."

Schmidt said that during the more recent warming period, most but not all of the ice might have disappeared from southern Greenland, leaving a thin layer that would have been sufficient to preserve the DNA.

The organic matter found in ice cores taken from a southern Greenland drilling site known as Dye 3 represents the oldest-ever authenticated DNA found by scientists to date, with fragments of beetles, tree bark, prehistoric spiders, and other life verified independently in laboratories in Denmark, Canada, and Germany.

... Scientists were able to isolate only about 1.6 ounces of organic matter from the ice at the bottom of the core sample, according to Enrico Cappellini, a researcher specializing in ancient proteins at Britain's University of York.

....Analysis of the insect mitochondria, cellular components that contain genomes that can be used to date DNA, as well as amino acids, indicate d that the creatures were at least 450,000 years old. Uncertainties with dating, however, leave the possibility that the DNA dated only as far back as the last interglacial period.

The identification of such relatively well-preserved genetic material beneath ice sheets was exciting news for biologists. Ten percent of the earth's surface has been covered by deep ice for tens of thousands of years. "We could be opening up a frozen world of new discoveries," said Cappellini, the University of York researcher.

....The Nordic settlements -- the first European presence in the New World -- survived for nearly 500 years before mysteriously disappearing. Historians speculate that either the inhabitants starved as Greenland grew colder or they were killed by Inuit, who appeared on the scene around 1200 AD.

I kept the last fragment because I didn't know that the Inuit arrived on Greenland relatively late. In summary:

1. The study suggests the Greenland ice layers may be more stable than thought, which supports the consensus sea level rise model. If the DNA is found, however, to only be 500,000 years old, this will actually argue for a large sea level rise.
2. It's possible that lower layers of the ice are resistant to melting even if the top layers melt, in which case we're back to thinking Greenland will raise sea levels in 50 to 100 years.
3. Since sea levels rose lots in the last interglacial, and since the water had to come from either Greenland or Antarctica, if Greenland didn't melt that means Antarctica did. We don't know why however, current models predict Antarctica won't melt.

Thinking it over I'm leaning a bit towards #2. I sure hope Antarctica won't be melting, that would push us more firmly into a large sea level rise ...

Update 7/9/07: See the interesting comment by "JC". This makes me worry a bit more about #3 now ...

Update 7/11/07: RealClimate has a very good review. It sounds like the researchers themselves were responsible for the confused interpretations. I'm used to medical researchers garbling their own findings (often by overstating them, usually wrongly), unsurprisingly the failing is not limited to the medical domain. The scientists were evidently soundly flogged, for they've issued a clarification with is gratifyingly close to what I ended up with after a savvy commeter corrected my understanding of Antarctic contribution to sea level rise in the last interglacial:

The scientists do not want to put into question the rise in sea level during a global warming. During the last interglacial period 125.000 years ago, temperatures in Greenland were 5 degrees higher and global sea level was 4-5 meters higher than it is today. However, since the new scientific results show that the ice sheet also covered southern Greenland, the melting of the Greenlandic ice cap can only have caused a sea level rise of about 2 meters. Therefore some of the ice contributing to the sea level rise must have come from other sources, for instance the Antarctic. Furthermore, thermal warming of the oceans will cause expansion of the sea water and result in a sea level rise of half a meter, and the melting of small glaciers around the globe will result in an additional half meter rise.

The emergence of the carbon tax: first, denial

The carbon tax will come, in one form or another. It's already starting to ooze into the public consciousness, in the form of articles about why it can't be discussed ...

Al Gore's inconvenient tax | csmonitor.com

... Live Earth pledges do call for personal action against global warming, such as becoming "carbon neutral" and buying only from businesses committed to solving the climate crisis. Mostly, however, they call for government action, such as a new treaty that would reduce greenhouse gases by 90 percent in rich countries within a few decades.

Any such treaty with that kind of demand for a swift drop in CO2 output would require the kind of radical change in lifestyles that a stiff carbon tax would bring. Consumption taxes, after all, are often designed to wean people off bad behavior, such as smoking.

A 90 percent drop in these emissions is probably what's needed to limit any rise in atmospheric warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a goal that many scientists recommend.

Most presidential candidates do endorse pinching pocketbooks, but only indirectly, such as by calling for higher fuel efficiency in vehicles and a cap on greenhouse-gas pollution from company smokestacks. Such demands on industry have the advantage of creating more certainty in reducing emissions, but they are complex to enforce. Gore would do both: tax carbon use and cap emissions.

Putting a crimp on global warming can't be done solely by promoting new energy technologies and voluntary conservation. Consumers of oil and coal need a direct tax shock.

But the last time Congress raised the gasoline tax was in 1993. In the Senate, Gore cast the deciding vote. At the next election in 1994, the GOP won big on Capitol Hill. Politicians took note.

It may take more than one Live Earth concert to warm up the public and politicians to a carbon tax.

I dimly recall that a recent poll, somewhere in europe, rated the importance of global warming below commuting times. We're early in this process, it seems inconceivable now that the public will ever accept a carbon tax. We know how this will go, however, we've seen this movie before.

First come articles like this one, describing the idea as impractical, impossible, political suicide. Next will come furious denunciations from the usual morons. Then we'll be deluged by attack ads designed to slow adoption for a few more years, as industry realizes change is coming but fights for cash flow and time to adjust. Then, after denial and anger, slowly, comes acceptance. Then gasoline goes to $7/gallon, then $10/gallon.

I liked the reference to smoking in the editorial, it was not accidental. A few years before I went to college teachers and students smoked in the classroom. Nowadays a teacher smoking in the classroom wouldn't be a mere firing offense, it would be a mandatory psychiatric consultation.

Al Gore knows this very well. Thanks Al.

Williams syndrome: infantile colic, dorsal/ventral balance, patterning genes and genetic determinism

The NYT has a long article on Williams syndrome. There's a lot in there, as noted by "bestyoucanbe" (emphases mine):

Be the Best You can Be: Williams syndrome: the NYT Magazine review

Williams syndrome has some features in common with autism, but it is, scientifically, much easier to study. For one thing it's much better defined than autism; persons with "Williams syndrome" resemble one another more more closely than persons with "autism". For another, we have a reasonable understanding of the gene injury involved, and we can expect to match up the gene products with the "phenotype" (behaviors)...

....Williams syndrome is fairly well characterized because of the physics of our chromosomes. The defect involves a patch that is prone to being "wrongly ripped", but the absence is not lethal. It is very likely that some of these genes are injured in other ways, or they vary in other ways. Persons with these variations won't have Williams syndrome, but they will have some characteristics of Williams syndrome. Some of those characteristics will have adaptive advantages, some won't. Something to remember when conversing with a "normal" person who's very talkative, doesn't seem to know when to pause for breath, and isn't very good at abstract thought ...

... There's a lot here. For example, the incidental comment on infantile colic made my eyebrows jump. Does Williams offer clues to one of the most puzzling and common disorders of infancy -- the mysterious disorder we call "colic"?!

The "dorsal" and "vental" regions remind me of the "left" and "right" hemisphere of the 1980s. Just like "left" and "right" hemispheres the "dorsal" areas sound more "male" and the "ventral" sound more female. One wonders how they morph during adolescence. As to dorsal/ventral balance (and SAT score balance) being rare; I suspect it's not so much that a "balance" is rare but rather that there's a comparatively flat normal distribution -- any point in the curve is 'rare'.

The "patterning genes" are also likely to feature in many stories over the next few years, as we learn how they influence talents and preferences. Sociopaths, of course, are of great interest to all of us these days ...

There are a few predictable outcomes of this research in the our evolving world. One is that, like Downs syndrome, Williams syndrome will become very rare over the next twenty years. The other is expectation is that we will learn how to tweak the dorsal/ventral balance; we'll misuse this knowledge somehow.

Quantum erasure and apple of the tree of knowledge

I skimmed the SciAM article on building a home "quantum eraser", but I didn't appreciate that the 1982 experiment is just one notch weirder than the what I'd read in Gribbin's 1997 book [1]. I realized how ++weird the result is upon reading Greenes description today [2].

As I dimly recall it, the "Aspect experiments" showed that the measured interference pattern that

• requires passage of a single photon through spatially separated paths simultaneously [3]

also

• requires no peeking after the photon has travelled the spatially separated paths
  

It's the "no-peeking after" part that made the experimental results so delicious. Causality (arrow of time), 1 dimensional time, and 3 dimensional space and "objective" reality all took big hits from the Aspect experiment. The discussion ever since has been which, if any, survived.

My weak understanding of Greenes' non-mathematical interpretation of the "erasure experiment was that the "no peeking after" clause is extended as follows:

and

• tricks that allow you to defer "peeking" until after the interference pattern ought to be formed don't work either (no surprise here, this is a variant of the Aspect experiment)
• if you set up a "deferred peeking" trick, but then undo it before you "peek", then the interference pattern can return. (surprise)
  

So it's the last bit that adds an additional note of sublime weirdness to the aspect experiment. It makes it just a bit easier to believe that the fundamental rule is really "no peeking". This is just something you can't know about.

It invariably reminds anyone taught by nuns of the "apple of the tree of knowledge" -- "but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.".

The universe seems to be telling us we can't watch some things too closely. Naturally, that only increases our appetite ....

[1] I really don't think Gribbin discussed this experiment, even though it was old when he wrote the book. It doesn't show up here either. I wonder why not ...

[2] Greenes is a cosmologist at heart, and he tends to shy away from the quantum weirdness Gribbin and others embrace, but he did a good job describing erasure.

[3] Paradox puzzles often require one to think carefully about what words mean, so I italicized a few of the interesting ones. Spatial separation, for example, has been shown not to mean what we thought it meant. Two entangled photons a universe apart are, by some measures, not separated at all.

Nature: 5 July 2007 - the quantum mechanics and science fiction issue

Nature, one of the two preeminent journals of science has dedicated a "science fiction" issue to examination of the multiverse and other QM interpretations. Of course nothing is available for viewing online, you have buy the issue. I'll see if I can get access through my U MN account. More later.

Update: I was too quick. The many worlds essay is available, some others may be too.

Future Shock: Charles Stross and Alvin Toffler

"Future Shock"  was published in 1970. I read it as a child; what I remember best is how "shocking" Toffler thought it was to have a shopping mall appear where houses once stood. There was nothing in the Toffler's book that was anywhere as "shocking" as this post by Charles Stross, a highly regarded writer of very ambitious modern "hard" science fiction:

Charlie's Diary: Unpacking the Zeitgeist

I'm trying to work out how I'd go about explaining this news item from WOWinsider to someone thirty years ago, in 1977, and it is making my head hurt because there are too many prior assumptions nested recursively inside it to unpack easily...

...There are thirty years' worth of future shock condensed into this one news item. And the reason I'm writing about it is that I don't think I could get away with putting such an conceptually overloaded incident into one of my novels; it would take too much set-up and require so much infodumping that many readers would lose interest. This Russian doll of a news item contains some rather scary pointers to where we're going, and a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.

There was another recent story about similar techniques (read the essay) used by children to bypass safety constraints set into Disney's online game communities. I think Schneier wrote about it; if I remember correctly the safety measures were to prevent non-game specific communications that might be exploited by very nasty adults. The children learned to rearrange objects to spell out messages they could not type.

So was Toffler being silly with his dire predictions of incapacitating "future shock" and the examples of vanishing shops that I remember? This is taken from the Wikipedia summary:

Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also coined the term "information overload".

In retrospect Toffler was wrong about the social transformations of 1970 (student unrest, racism, the civil rights movement, free speech, divorce drugs, rock and roll, antiwar demonstrations) being due to "future shock". They had a technological component (television, affordable automobiles, contraceptives, the emergent middle class, widespread education), but they were mostly due to demographics.

The examples of "future shock" I recall from the book also seem quaint nowadays, and hardly very threatening. We're used to massive structures vanishing and transforming with little knowledge, and most of us don't even live in Shanghai or Bangkok.

And yet ...

I have a suspicion we're not doing so well these days. There's a lot going on that, I think, would be setting off alarm bells in a healthy society. Instead, our society is quiet, passive, disconnected. We're more like stunned sheep than active participants in a changing world.

Maybe Toffler wasn't so much wrong as premature.

Photosynth. From ....

I expect something like this from Google, not from Microsoft.

• The TED demo: watch the video. I don't like watching videos, but this is well worth five minutes. You can zip past the boring introduction.
• Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth is the technology demo

The image management performance is astounding, but the jaw dropping part is the demonstration of the synthesis of thousands of Flickr images into a spatially coherent whole with essentially unlimited resolution.

The next demo might as well start with an picture of earth and end up with an atomic force image of an atom. Why not?

There are obvious implications for radiology imaging and image management.

Via CT.

It's time to cancel the war on terror - and the orange alert

It was a mistake. Emphases mine.

A New Declaration of Independence - Early Warning - William Arkin Washington Post

.. We live in an age where a terrorist attack could occur on any given day in any given public place. I'm afraid there's no returning to an imagined simpler era. The more we turn these criminal attacks into an assault on our national security, however, the more we reward terrorists with the attention they seek, and the more we turn terrorists into "warriors."

... the administration is applying the wrong strategy to the "fight," pursuing an approach that builds an environment of public fear. It's time, then, to declare independence from this hopeless cycle and demand a return to the pre-9/11 era of law enforcement. In the case of terrorism, war is not the answer.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says that because of the attacks and plots in the United Kingdom, security will be elevated at U.S. airports and other transit hubs today and through the holiday weekend. As President Bush says, "You never know where they may try to strike."

I'd say this response were a transparent attempt to incite fear in the public -- except that I think that the government may actually be clueless as to how best to respond. Yes, the president's observation has a partisan tinge to it. More important, however, his statement suggests another lost battle in a "war" that is no such thing.

... After 9/11, the reaction of the national security monolith was to decry the former "law enforcement" mode of counterterrorism. This was a kind of right-wing "Blame America" argument, suggesting that a litigious approach and our own high regard for the law were responsible for the ineffectual fight against al Qaeda. Only an all-out "war," the argument went, could save America and, by extension, the West....

... I'm sure that there is more that could be done, especially with the warfare paradigm: Throw more soldiers into the fight, employ better weapons, match each measure with a counter-measure. It's never-ending, because war is the wrong conception.

What is needed is a declaration that the war is over. Terrorists are not warriors, they are just criminals...

Also, can we stop with the freakin' "orange alert" already? Orange is the new norm. We aren't going back to yellow, or green, or whatever the colors used to be in the magic world we used to live in. I'd say we go to "normal" and "red", and red can't last more than 3 days without a renewal by Congress.