John McCain is against Reason

McCain is not a rationalist.

Immune to the Facts - The Opinionator - Opinion - New York Times Blog

...“At a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that ‘there’s strong evidence’ that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. — a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment,” writes Tapper. “McCain was responding to a question from the mother of a boy with autism, who asked about a recent story that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program had issued a judgment in favor of an unnamed child whose family claimed regressive encephalopathy and symptoms of autism were caused by thimerosal.”...

I recall McCain also favors teaching creationism in schools.

No big surprise. The GOP has a strong anti-science bias, McCain is their man.

Signs of the singularity: science fiction gives up

How do we know the rapture of the nerds is nigh upon us?

One clue is the state of "hard" science fiction. Not Star Trek stuff, but science fiction that tries to visit a real world 10 to 100 years from now (the masters, on occasion, make a stab far beyond that).

Someone writing this type of fiction wants it to be readable for at least 5-10 years. If they write in 2005 about the worldwide telescope's debut in 2015, then they're embarrassed when it debuts in 2008. Their work takes a hit, and might even seem silly.

Charlie Stross, one of the grandmasters, tells us how hard this game is getting after reading an Economist article about "High tech leapfrog". A World bank graph shows how quickly new technologies are disseminating around the world, in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Charlie's Diary: Blindsided by the future

...Here, in a nutshell, is why writing near-future SF has become so difficult. Say you want to set a story 30 years out, and as part of your world-building exercise you want to work out what technologies will be in widespread use by the time of the story. Back in 1900 to 1950 you could do so with a fair degree of accuracy; pick a couple of embryonic technologies and assume they'll be widespread (automobiles, aircraft, television): maybe throw in a couple of wildcards for good measure (wrist-watch telephones), and you're there. But today, that 30-year window is inaccessible. Even a 15-year horizon is pushing it. Something new could come along tomorrow and overrun the entire developed world before 2023.

Speed up this uptake curve a little bit by pushing it 20 years out, and you begin to see the outline of an onrushing singularity ... from the pages of The Economist.

(This post was prompted by the discovery that what I thought was a new and imaginative candidate for a not-here-today everywhere-by-2023 technology to stick in my next SF novel is, in fact, already here in concept form and will doubtless be around by 2013 and as unremarkable as wallpaper by 2023 ...)

This DeLong article on the Invention Transition is relevant; memes are propagating even faster than technologies -- indeed they probably enable the technologic dissemination.

The stunning collapse of television news

Even we aliens who live among humans have a hard time tracking their behaviors -- particularly since we are unable to watch television without major tranquilizers.

For example, this Zogby survey shows a rate of change faster than we imagined.

Print newspaper readership evidently collapsed completely some time ago. Only 10% of the adults surveyed get their news primarily from newspapers:

...10% newspaper figure is bolstered by the senior crowd, 17% of whom are still committed to the absurdly resource-intensive practice of consuming news on pulped, printed, and delivered dead trees. (... only 7% of the 18-29 crowd follows this example)...

Aliens, of course, stopped subscribing to print newspapers around 1998. I hadn't noticed the absence of newspaper delivery in our neighborhood until I read this however. It's been a long time since I've seen anyone delivering a newspaper to a neighboring home. In fact, it's been a while since I've seen a newspaper in a home, though I routinely read them at the cafe.

I suppose the newspaper delivery business, which I entered around age 8 or so, has gone the way of the telegram.

The really surprising story is the collapse of television as a news source:

... 48% said their primary source of news is the Internet (up 20% from only a year ago)....38% of 65+ year olds are clinging to TV as the primary source of news, but they're the only age group that favors a medium other than the Internet as the primary delivery vehicle...

That 20% shift is almost entirely from television news to the Internet. In one year.

Of course a good chunk of the news this alien reads on the net comes from the NYT, the BBC, and, via Google, by a range of traditional providers. My Feed portion, however, comes largely from non-traditional providers. (The Economist is on the list however).

I wonder what the humans are using for net news?

36% regard "blogs" as an important source of news.

Uh oh. The humans are turning into aliens ...

The real story, however, is the collapse of television news as a routine source of news. I've already mentioned that our children's generation don't seem to watch television much at all.

I don't think the sudden death of television is getting enough attention. The pending switch to digital broadcast will kill off our rabbit ears, I wonder if it will finish off traditional broadcast and cable television completely.

Heparin production: scraping pig intestines

If you'd asked me about how Chinese Heparin was made for Baxter pharmaceuticals, I wouldn't have thought of this ...

Blood Thinner Might Be Tied to More Deaths - New York Times: 

...The New York Times reported Thursday that at least one of the consolidators received supplies from small, unregulated family workshops that scraped mucous membrane from pig intestines and cooked it, eventually producing a dry substance known as crude heparin...

...The Chinese heparin market has been in turmoil over the last year, as pig disease has swept through the country, depleting stocks, leading some farmers to sell sick pigs into the market and forcing heparin producers to scramble for new sources of raw material.

As a result, even big companies have been turning increasingly to small village workshops, which are often unsanitary. In interviews this week at some of these workshops, employees told The Times that they had not been inspected by the government....

The GOP sacrificed our regulatory infrastructure to the great God of the Holy Market, who's Hand Invisible punishes all evil and brings the greatest good to the greatest number.

Get Bush and the GOP out of office. Now.

What lies ahead for Obama

If he gets the nomination, we know what the McCain playbook will be. Josh Marshall lays it out for us ...

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall | Road Map

Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can't.

But that's not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we'll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point...

... You've got your multiple distribution channels. You've got the way McCain's selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you've got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.

Both can work simultaneously. In fact, in the kind of campaign McCain's running, they're both essential for success (see the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina). The key is just that the channels don't cross. Because that's when the trouble starts and they can begin to undermine or even short-circuit each other...

... Don't insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain's plan for this race doesn't rely on hundreds of Cunninghams -- large and small -- across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it's the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.

If McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today. And once he's done talking to the people who will be running his Tennessee campaign, we'll have a number of others he can talk to, like the head of his Ohio campaign, former Sen. Mike DeWine, who gave that Cunningham guy his marching orders.

Let's just not fool ourselves, not lie to ourselves about what's happening here and who's in charge.

Every day, in every way: Muslim, HUSSEIN, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab, shifty, hustler, druggie.

Get used to it and be ready.

As for us, our campaign donation is ready and waiting for the nominee.

2/29/2008: Morford says it with a flourish.

Brad DeLong Lecture slide: The Invention Transition

From his Berkeley Economics course: Brad DeLong's Slides: The Invention Transition

• Population (n)--two heads are better than one
• Education (f_i)--standing on the shoulders of giants
• Societal openness (l_i)--how many people can you talk to before being "shown the instruments"
• Means of communication--language, writing, printing, etc....
• If these four are hobbled, the pace of invention will be slow
  • Fortunately, no global technological regress (that we remember, at least)
  • Only seven known--and disputed--known examples of "local" technological regress
  • Iron Dark Age, Medieval Dark Age, Medieval Greenland Vikings, Mayan Heartland, Mississippi Mound-Builders, Easter Island, Flinders Island...

DeLong's "Chains of Innovation" equation has a parameter representing "number of links to others"; the "economy-wide innovation" value tends to infinity as the number of links and "probability of successful transmission" increase.

In my lifetime I've seen the "links to others" bit grow exponentially.

Hello Singularity.

I was struck by the comment that there are only seven known examples of "local" technological regress. Technology is sticky.

Tulshiram and Baba Amte

Which of these humans is not like the others ...

Baba Amte | Obituary | Economist.com

HE HADN'T meant to touch it. As he grubbed in the rain-filled gutter to pick up dog shit, human excrement and blackened, rotten vegetables, stowing them in the basket he carried on his head, he brushed what seemed to be a pile of rags, and it moved a little. The pile was flesh; it was a leper, dying. Eyes, nose, fingers and toes had already gone. Maggots writhed on him. And Murlidhar Devidas Amte, shaking with terror and nausea, stumbled to his feet and ran away...

...Deliberately, he went back to the gutter to feed the leper and to learn his name, Tulshiram. He then carried him home to care for him until he died, and began—once he had had training in Calcutta—to work in leper clinics all around the town.

His own ashram, founded in 1951 on barren, rocky land full of snakes, was specifically for the handicapped and for lepers, who built and tilled it from scratch with half a dozen tools and their stumps of hands. It was called Anandwan, “grove of joy”; its philosophy was that lepers could be rehabilitated not by charity, nor by the begging life in railway stations and on streets, but by hard work and creativity, which would bring self-respect. Not by tears, but by sweat, Mr Amte wrote once, and noted how similar those were.

By his death around 3,000 people lived at Anandwan. The farm grew millet, grains and fruit; in the schools, lepers taught the blind, deaf and dumb; there were colleges, two hospitals, workshops and an orchestra, where popular songs were conducted by a polio victim. Warora townsfolk, who had shunned the ashram in its early years, had learnt to buy its vegetables and drink its milk without fear of contagion. And at its centre, himself crippled from his 50s by degeneration of the spine, lay Mr Amte on his cot in his white home-woven vest and shorts, smilingly encouraging human beings to see the divine spark in each other...

WorldWide Telescope: A spring gift from Microsoft Research

Microsoft is delivering the universe this spring, dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray.

WWTelescope Frequently Asked Questions

... The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft®'s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience...

I remember when Planetaria were high tech -- "... planetarium projection apparatus uses a hollow ball with a light inside, and a pinhole for each star, hence the name "star ball".

Yes, back then I liked to go and watch a fancier version of a flashlight in a tin can.

Now we have Google Sky, and soon we'll have the WorldWide Telescope.

Weird.

I'd like to hook the WWTelescope to a big HDTV and a remote control ...

Billionaire wanted - how to manage a broken brain in the stone age

Bestyoucan is seeking a billionaire with a cognitively disabled child or sibling ...

Be the Best You can Be How do you manage a broken brain? We don't know

How do you manage a broken brain?

...Do you create a profile of all the strengths and weaknesses, a visual representation to analyze and evaluate? An MRI of the mind?

Do we create programs to strengthen the weakest areas, or do we leverage the stronger domains? Or perhaps the middle range?

Can two or three areas of strength be combined to help an area of weakness? What role might cognition-medications have? What role do psychostimulants have?

How do we measure progress? How do we know when to change direction?

How do we intervene in infancy, when surgeons can remove half the brain and a child can still go to college? In early childhood? In pre-adolescence? During the teen years? In adulthood? In old age?

How do we leverage computerized, robotic, and remote human aides to support severely impaired cognitive functions?

We flippin' don't know...

... I can imagine ways to start to make progress. Ways to study developing brains and minds. Ways to create comprehensive profiles of strengths and weaknesses and use those profiles in discussion and analysis. What I can't see is how to make significant progress in my lifespan with the available political will and funding....

Let him know if you find any.

Palm OS Obit #245 - and a contrary opinion on the death of the mobile platform

Yet another Palm / Handheld obit, this time focusing on applications: Mobile Opportunity: Mobile applications, RIP.

There are some interesting bits in the essay. Fragmentation of platforms (esp. Microsoft's numerous platforms) made it prohibitively expensive to reach large numbers of users. Java was mentioned in an editorial aside, I think it deserves more attention as a disaster all by itself.

Greedy/incompetent carriers sought funds through "certification", but never seemed to have much interest in building a platform.

I particularly appreciated the discussion on marketing and platforms. I can confirm that the great free websites promoting PalmOS software are largely gone ...

(Elia Freedman): Then there's marketing. Here too there are two issues. The first is vertical marketing. Few mobile devices align with verticals, which makes it hard for a vertical application developer like us to partner with any particular device. For example, Palm even at its height had no more than 20% of real estate agents. To cover our development costs on 20% of target customer base, I had to charge more than the customers could pay. So I was forced to make my application work on more platforms, which pushed me back into the million platforms problem.

The other marketing problem is the disappearance of horizontal distribution. You used to have some resellers and free software sites on the web that promoted mobile shareware and commercial products at low or no charge. You could also work through the hardware vendors to get to customers. We were masters of this; at one point we were bundled on 85% of mobile computing devices. We had retail distribution too.

None of those avenues are available any more. Retail has gone away. The online resellers have gone from taking 20% of our revenue to taking 50-70%. The other day I went looking for the freeware sites where we used to promote, and they have disappeared. Hardware bundling has ended because carriers took that over and made it impossible for us to get on the device. Palm used to have a bonus CD and a flyer that they put in the box, where we could get promoted. The carriers shut down both of those. They do not care about vertical apps. It feels like they don't want any apps at all.

Michael Mace continues:

...I've always had faith that eventually we would solve these problems. We'd get the right OS vendor paired with a handset maker who understood the situation and an operator who was willing to give up some control, and a mobile platform would take off again. Maybe not Palm OS, but on somebody's platform we'd get it all right.

I don't believe that any more. I think it's too late...f you're creating a website, you don't have to get permission from a carrier. You don't have to get anything certified by anyone. You don't have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don't have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won't even be aware that you exist. It'll just be you and the user, communicating directly.
...

Not bad, but I think there's a flaw in his reasoning. He's clearly stating that Palm built an elegant platform, but failed to create a robust business model.

That's not my recollection.

Palm did build a very elegant platform with the Palm III and V, but after the V their quality went off a cliff. Around the same time Microsoft cut them out of the business market with Exchange, and then Palm chopped off its remaining leg by fighting a no-win battle with Xerox over Graffiti One.

As for a developer community, Palm had the Palm Economy -- not a bad idea. I can't speak to their execution on that, but my sense it collapsed because the platform rotted away first.

Microsoft, meanwhile, having destroyed all their competitors without actually delivering anything, developed mad cow diseases and drove the Mobile PC platform into the grave for the heck of it. (Hey, how else can you explain their mobile strategy?)

So now we have the iPhone. The browser experience leads people like Mace to predict that the browser is the new platform.

Maybe.

On the other hand, there are a lot of very, very smart developers who want to create the best possible native experiences for millions of iPhone users. Experiences that work on airplanes, cars, trains and lots of other places where the wireless experience sucks. Sure, you'll be able to create disconnected apps using Google Gears 2009 and Adobe AIR 2009, but they won't have the smooth elegance of native apps.

If Apple can prosper while staying clear of Microsoft's Exchange turf (don't go there Apple, it's a death trap) Mace may discover that he's declared the mobile platform dead at exactly the wrong time ...

Using a webcam to help with audio-only phone conferences

I'm certain someone has written about this, but I couldn't find it on a quick web search.

Office videoconferencing has been limited by corporate bandwidth and the dismal state of USB webcams [1]; there's no practical solution that enables one to share whiteboard work over a video link for example. Even so, I've recently been persuaded that for many people, including me, even crummy low resolution images enable better social interaction and higher quality communication.

So I've started using a webcam with Office Communicator 2005. Unfortunately the people I communicate with don't usually have a webcam, so it's one way. They see me. I either see a blank space or my own face.

That's where I made an interesting discovery. It helps me, when on a phone call, to see my own face. It helps me be more patient, and even to be a better listener. Of course, as Emily points out, a mirror would have the same effect -- but a mirror in my office would seem a bit .... odd.

So I'm experimenting with viewing my own face and body language when I'm on voice only calls. I'm guessing it will help me be more conscious of my own reactions, and better able to manage the call. 

I suspect this might be a bigger help for people with geek-genes than for non-geeks. 

This would make an interesting psychology study btw ...

(I'm sure someone has written about doing this with a mirror in the "old days". One could probably use an iPhone with "mirror" wallpaper in place of a physical mirror or webcam.)

[1] BTW, the built-in Mac webcams aren't the equal of the much mourned firewire iSight (best webcam ever) but they produce much better results than my Microsoft LifeCam. It's not just resolution, it's also video rate, color balance, focus, white balance and, above all, adjustment for variable lighting.

The meaning of median compensation with a high school education

The problem with this statement

William Kristol's bad grade in economics - How the World Works - Salon.com

...For American men with only a high school education, Rodrik writes, median compensation has declined by 10 percent since 1980...

is that the average man with only a high school education in 1980 is probably not the same as the average man with only a high school education in 2008. In 2008 we're talking about someone who's either making some very bad decisions or who has a very significant cognitive disability. In 1980 the group would have included many people who would now go to college or trade school; back then these folks could enter the blue collar labor market and be reasonably well paid.

I think if one adjusted for IQ the income decline would be much less than 10%.

Odd to find myself almost defending Kristol here, as I do believe that much of America is being "Left Behind" - economically speaking. It's just that I have a hard time letting an illogical statement stand ...

Sometimes medical progress is exceedingly slow

Much is made of the great speed of medical progress, of impossibility or keeping up, etc, etc.

Sometimes yes, that is true -- though much that is "new" does not last. Often though, progress is glacial.

One of my medical hobbies is using a Pubmed feed to track articles written about aphthous stomatitis (aka canker sores). This is a generally benign (albeit painful) condition that remains almost as mysterious today as it was when I entered McGill in 1982.

For example, today's feed tossed up an article that could have been written thirty years ago: Topical minocycline for managing symptoms of recur...[Spec Care Dentist. 2008 Jan-Feb].

Sheesh.

In 1982 we were pretty sure canker sores would not be a great mystery in 2008. Of course in 1995 we were certain everyone would have fiber to the desktop by 2001 ...

Dark energy is not a force, and another take on fermions and bosons

This December post by CV has been in my queue for a while. He starts out complaining about the popular depiction of Dark Energy as a "force", but soon digresses into lots of basic physics I have trouble remembering.

Here are the parts I particularly liked:

A Dark, Misleading Force | Cosmic Variance

... The wrong part is referring to dark energy as a “force,” which it’s not...

... quantum field theory implies that the ingredients of a four-dimensional universe are divided neatly into two types: fermions, which cannot pile on top of each other due to the exclusion principle, and bosons, which can. That’s extremely close to the stuff/force distinction, and indeed we tend to associate the known bosonic fields — gravity, electromagnetism, gluons, and weak vector bosons — with the “forces of nature.” Personally I like to count the Higgs boson as a fifth force rather than a new matter particle, but that’s just because I’m especially fastidious....

...dark energy is definitely “stuff.” It’s not a new force. (There might be a force associated with it, if the dark energy is a light scalar field, but that force is so weak that it’s not been detected, and certainly isn’t responsible for the acceleration of the universe.) In fact, the relevant force is a pretty old one — gravity! Cosmologists consider all kinds of crazy ideas in their efforts to account for dark energy, but in all the sensible theories I’ve heard of, it’s gravity that is the operative force. The dark energy is causing a gravitational field, and an interesting kind of field that causes distant objects to appear to accelerate away from us rather than toward us, but it’s definitely gravity that is doing the forcing here...

...Anyone who has spoken about “energy” or “dimensions” to a non-specialist audience has come across this language barrier. Just recently it was finally beaten into me how bad “dark” is for describing “dark matter” and “dark energy.” What we mean by “dark” in these cases is “completely transparent to light.” To your average non-physicist, it turns out, “dark” might mean “completely absorbs light.” Which is the opposite! Who knew? That’s why I prefer calling it “smooth tension,” which sounds more Barry White than Public Enemy.

What I would really like to get rid of is any discussion of “negative pressure.” The important thing about dark energy is that it’s persistent — the density (energy per cubic centimeter) remains roughly constant, even as the universe expands. Therefore, according to general relativity, it imparts a perpetual impulse to the expansion of the universe, not one that gradually dilutes away. A constant density leads to a constant expansion rate, which means that the time it takes the universe to double in size is a constant. But if the universe doubles in size every ten billion years or so, what we see is distant galaxies accelerating away — first they are X parsecs away, then they are 2X parsecs away, then 4X parsecs away, then 8X, etc. The distance grows faster and faster, which we observe as acceleration...

Italics mine. I left out his further discussion on negative pressure, he persuaded me that it's a dumb concept (sort of like "centrifugal force").

Challenges of software as service: Spolsky's version

Amazon's S3 was down the other day. A lot of company's that use S3 were down too.

Such are the woes of 'software as service' -- what we used to call "application service provision".

Amazon didn't say much about the S3 outage, but when something similar happened to Joel Spolsky's product he had quite a few interesting comments:

Five whys - Joel on Software

..Most well-run online services will have two, maybe three outages a year. With so few data points, the length of the outage starts to become really significant, and that's one of those things that's wildly variable. Suddenly, you're talking about how long it takes a human to get to the equipment and swap out a broken part. To get really high uptime, you can't wait for a human to switch out failed parts. You can't even wait for a human to figure out what went wrong: you have to have previously thought of every possible thing that can possibly go wrong, which is vanishingly improbable. It's the unexpected unexpecteds, not the expected unexpecteds, that kill you.

...Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century. Even the most notoriously reliable systems, like AT&T's long distance service, have had long outages (six hours in 1991) which put them at a rather embarrassing three nines ... and AT&;T's long distance service is considered "carrier grade," the gold standard for uptime.

Keeping internet services online suffers from the problem of black swans. Nassim Taleb, who invented the term, defines it thus: "A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations." Almost all internet outages are unexpected unexpecteds: extremely low-probability outlying surprises. They're the kind of things that happen so rarely it doesn't even make sense to use normal statistical methods like "mean time between failure."...

Spolsky cares deeply about customer service, his company's response is impeccable.

Others don't do nearly as well. I have trouble imaging large corporations caring enough to delivery truly reliable service, though the phone companies (for all their many ills) managed it for many years.