So you think you can ride a bike?

I've done some bike tours. Not like this ...

Ian Hibell | Economist.com

.... IN A man’s life there comes a time when he must get out of Brixham. He must leave the boats bobbing in the harbour, the Devon cream teas, the holiday camp and the steam railway; he must bid farewell to the nine-to-five job at Standard Telephones and Cables, up the A379 in Paignton, and hit the more open road.

Some might get no farther than Bristol. But Ian Hibell went so far in one direction that his eyebrows crusted with frost and his hands froze; and so far in another that he lay down in the hot sand to die of dehydration (as he expected) under a thorn tree; and so far in another that the safest place to be, out of range of the mosquitoes, was to burrow like an alligator into black, viscous mud.

In the course of his 40-year travelling life he went the equivalent of ten times round the equator, covering 6,000 miles or so a year. He became the first man to cycle the Darien Gap in Panama, and the first to cycle from the top to the bottom of the American continent. He went from Norway to the Cape of Good Hope and from Bangkok to Vladivostok, wheeling or walking every inch of the way...

... His favourite had a Freddie Grubb frame of Reynolds 531 tubing on a 42-inch wheelbase, reinforced to take the extra weight of goatskins holding water; Campagnolo Nuevo Record gears front and rear; Robregal double-butted 14-16-gauge spokes; and Christophe pedal-straps. It was so lightweight, as touring bikes go, that a group of boys in Newfoundland mocked that it would soon break on their roads....

This bike sounds a bit like my 1976 Raleigh International. Mr Hibell died on is bicycle, struck by a car driven badly.

Another slap for we hysterical democrats

via Cosmic Variance, I go to a great rant (censoring mine) ...

Whatever - A Previous Message Repeated, Slightly More Forcefully

... Please accept that this contest is going to be close. Please accept that you will have to fight for it tooth and nail. Please accept that the GOP will feast on every single ****** instance in which you show even the slightest hint of entitlement to the presidency. Please accept that the GOP SOP is to win by any means necessary, and that they’ve cultivated an entire generation of political strategists and media lackeys who can’t think in any other way, and whose allegiance to the party is reflexive and far stronger than their interest in things like facts. Please accept that the entire thrust of the GOP strategy between now and November is to keep knocking actual issues out of the political news cycle. Please stop acting surprised and resentful about any of this. The GOP will crush you — again — if you keep doing it. For ****’s sake, they’ve played you exactly the same way since the 2000 election. Will you please exhibit a learning curve. You’ve been here before....

Thanks, I needed that.

The Party is stronger than the Fact. 

Where have we seen that before. Can't quite recall. Seems strangely familiar though ... Guess I should have paid more attention in history class ...

I've added Scalzi (Whatever) to my blogroll. Let's see what else s/he can do.

Chinese recall of melamine contaminated infant formula

The formula is not approved for distribution in the US, but the FDA suspects ethnic markets may sell it here. Infant formula contaminated with melamine has been recalled in China:

FDA: Melamine found in baby formula made in China - USATODAY.com

... The Food and Drug Administration is alerting Asian and ethnic markets across the USA that infant formula made in China may be contaminated.

The FDA is working with state health agencies across the country to make members of Chinese-American communities aware of the danger.

Chinese newspapers report that some infant formula has been linked to kidney problems and kidney stones in babies in China because the formula contains melamine — the same industrial contaminant from China that poisoned and killed thousands of U.S. dogs and cats last year.

Sanlu Group, the major Chinese dairy that produced the formula, has recalled 700 tons of the product, state Xinhua News Agency reported today.

No baby formula approved for use in the USA is manufactured in China, the FDA says. 'We want to reassure the public that there's no contamination in the domestic supply of infant formula,' says Janice Oliver, deputy of operations at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition."

It's very likely that Chinese infants get quite a bit of melamine in their formula. It's used to make formula appear more nutritious than it is, allowing use of cheap ingredients. Melamine has no nutritional value, so the infants are being both poisoned and starved of nutrients.

Humans are supposed to be fairly resistant to its effect, and the toxicity in cats and dogs was supposed to require simultaneous contamination with cyanuric acid -- still these are baby kidneys. Many must have been harmed.

I wonder if the recall is a sign that China is getting more serious about caring for its people?

A good reminder that the food fraud saga continues.

Update 9/14/08: Turns out a New Zealand company forced the recall, it wasn't a sign of increased attention by Chinese authorities. Infants died, we may never know how many. It sounds like the nutritional content of the "formula" may have been very low, probably lower than the dog food shipments.

McCain's effective lies and the post-fact society

The McCain campaign campaign is lying low and high, left and right, and they're not even bothering to cover their tracks.

Is Farhad Manjoo right that we live in a post-fact society?

Why doesn't Barack Obama lie more often? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

... In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

In particular, McCain is feeding off long-held conservative antipathy to the mainstream news media, the same force that propelled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth four years ago. The Swift Boat message was conceived on talk radio; in the months before they caught the attention of TV producers, the vets appeared on hundreds of local radio stations across the country to push the story that the media wasn't telling the whole truth about Kerry. By the time they'd raised enough money to run TV ads, the Swift Vets had built up a huge network of people ready to defend their claims. These networks managed to render fact-checking not just ineffective, but countereffective—when newspapers pointed out flaws in the Swift Vets' claims, the Vets' defenders would pounce, arguing that the very act of fact-checking proved that the media was in the tank for Kerry.

The same dynamic is at work in the Palin rollout: "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent," Republican strategist John Feehery told the Washington Post. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

Obama has inherent, obvious disadvantages in pushing a message in which "little facts don't really matter." For one thing, he's boxed in by his oft-repeated search for a different kind of politics. But given the tenor of the campaign, Obama's audience might be happy to see him take the low road. In the past, Democratic voters have been willing to accept lies. Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2004, the Kerry campaign managed to convince Americans that 3 million jobs had been lost during George W. Bush's first term (at the time of the election, it was less than 2 million) and that Bush "favored sending American jobs overseas." (He didn't.) Kerry and others on the left repeated these claims often, and in time they took root.

The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with—ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. McCain's signature policy goal is cutting out earmarks. But as the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen points out, in promising to veto all earmarks, McCain has inadvertently called for cutting some popular programs—including all U.S. assistance to Israel, which is technically provided through a kind of earmark. Of course McCain doesn't really want to stop giving aid to Israel; an ad that suggested McCain's cost-cutting zeal would lead to abandoning Israel would be as dishonest as McCain's sex-ed ad. But it might also be effective, reinforcing the idea that McCain wants to cut too much.

Or what about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100—or even 1,000!—years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing "bomb Iran" and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2 million people have watched it. It's hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama's advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.

It's another version of the Strauss Gap. The GOP knows that the American people aren't all that concerned about what's true any more. Post-fact society? I'll buy that.

If the American people don't rediscover an interest in mere reality pretty damned soon, Obama will have to join the McCain lie train.

Post-fact society? Not enlightenment 2.0. Not good.

Dark times indeed.

Update 11/6/2008: Was I wrong? Damn, but I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. See also. Yee-hah. I was wrong. Obama, you were right. I'm so glad you're going to be President and I'm not.

Worse than Bush

I never believed the 'we couldn't get anyone worse than Bush' story. Bush was only as bad as he was because the GOP also held the House and the Senate. If the Dems had held the Senate (Paul Wellstone, your plane crash changed history horribly) he would have been simply another bad leader - instead of one of the worst to ever occupy the White House.

Krugman now says McCain/Palin could be worse than Bush/Cheney (emphases mine)...

Krugman - Blizzard of Lies - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again....

...how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Only if the Dems lost the Senate and were crushed in the House. So worse in potential, but in practice -- probably not.

I emphasized "at least in America", by which Krugman really means the past 100 years in America, because America is starting to resemble Argentina. Yes, it could happen here.

Incidentally, FactCheck.org backs up Krugman on the blizzard of lies. It's not just we Dems saying that.

FactCheck.org: all the lies exposed -- even ours

FactCheck.org is an establishment web site -- not a campaign site. We need them desperately ...

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics....

The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 ...

The APPC accepts NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

True, they've had to expose an awful lot of Palin/McCain lies recently, but they whacked one Obama commercial too.

Brad DeLong pointed me to them, and he's always right.

There's a feed, I'll be sharing interesting posts on my Google Reader shared items feed (you can subscribe like any feed). We need Annenberg more than ever.

Information we shouldn't fear: the McCain/Palin science curricula

Unsurprisingly, Palin is a fan of creationism. She uses the old "nyah, nyah, you're a scaredy cat" line of argument:

Palin brings creationism debate back into the headlines: Scientific American Blog

...The addition of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to the GOP presidential ticket has brought the creationism-evolution fight back into the news cycle as voters learn more about her agnostic take on the subject 'Teach both ' Palin has said. 'You know don’t be afraid of information.'"

Ahh, don't be afraid. Good thought.

So which creation stories shall we teach?

Since we live in north america, we could choose an Inuit or Amerindian story. Or, since we live in a post-industrial world, we could teach the theory that we live in a simulation, and that our "universe" is immaterial. Or there's the theory that our dark energy infested universe is a beta design that fell off a post-singular assembly line.

Hmm, what do the Satanists say about Creation? They must have a story too. It would be unfair to leave them out.

While we're at it, let's introduce astrology into the science curriculum too. No reason not to, lots of people like astrology. Not science of course, but neither is creationism. Reagan was a big fan, so Palin must approve.

During human history many people have believed that human sacrifices can appease the gods. Let's add some human sacrifice to our science curricula.

India and China, the future of humanity may now be upon your shoulders.

Gail Collins reality check - Wolves for Obama

I admit to a certain fondness for my former Canadian passport when I see the Strauss Gap in action. It's not that Canadians are much more enlightened than us, it's more that they are in a different place in their democracy/tyranny cycle.

So I appreciate today's friendly slap from Gail Collins...

Op-Ed Columnist - Misery Loves Democrats - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... Cheer up, Obama-ites. You’re overreacting. I’ll answer all your questions as long as you promise to take deep breaths into this nice paper bag.

Have you seen the polls? He should be talking more about the economy! Why isn’t his campaign working harder?

If the Obama brain trust seems relatively serene compared with its seething base, it’s because they live in the Electoral College world, where the presidential race only takes place in a third of the country. They don’t care about national polls — a concept as quaint as measuring one’s wealth by caribou pelts. They worry about the undecided vote in Minnesota and Ohio and run their TV ads (about the economy) in places like Colorado and Michigan and Florida. If you live in California or New York or Texas, you don’t really have much of a feel for their level of effort because as far as they’re concerned, you’ve already voted.

I’m beginning to think we should have gone with Hillary Clinton.

Hillary now lives in a golden alternative universe. As soon as the Democrats had actually nominated Obama, they decided that Clinton was by far the better candidate and that they had destroyed their chances by not choosing her. This is the nature of the party. If she had not been in the race, the Democrats would probably be bemoaning the fact that they hadn’t stuck with John Edwards and nailed down the critical swing-state philanderer vote....

...If you really want to see a strange line of attack, take a look at the wolf ad. It cuts from Palin’s face to Obama’s to packs of wolves prowling through the forest, presumably in search of vice-presidential prey. Then comes the text claiming that as Barack drops in the polls, “he’ll try to destroy her.” Given Palin’s affection for shooting wolves from airplanes with high-powered rifles, it’d be more appropriate to have them cowering in their dens while she aims her machine gun from a diving Cessna.

Thanks Gail, I needed that. Molly Ivins would approve.

Allies of the enlightenment, we must face the GOP's bullets of cowardly stupidity. Yes, America may choose to embrace the dark ages and plunge the world into poverty, war, and bleak despair, but we Wolves for Obama must howl against the coming of the Dark.

Kateva has volunteered to be our mascot. True, she's not exactly a wolf, but there's something about the eyes ...

Update: Krugman responds - no, panic please.

The Economist predicts an early Singularity through neuroengineering

No sooner had I put myself in the between near and far Singularity group, than The Economist declares for a very near Singularity in the form of a hard AI super-mind [1] (emphases mine – they don’t mention Kurzweil, Vinge, or any of the usual suspects) …

Tech.view | Minds of their own | Economist.com

… The progress being made in neuroengineering—devising machines that mimic the way the brain and other bodily organs function—has been literally eye-opening. In the decade since Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University in Britain, had a silicon chip implanted in his arm so he could learn how to build better prostheses for the disabled, we now have cochlear implants that allow the deaf to hear, and a host of other spare mechanical parts to replace defective organs.

A bionic eye, to help people suffering from macular degeneration, is in the works, and artificial synapses are being tested as possible replacements for damaged optic nerves. An implantable electronic hippocampus—the world’s first brain prosthesis—is being developed for people who lose the ability to store long-term memories following a stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease.

Meanwhile, a team at the University of Sheffield in Britain has built a “brainbot” controlled by a mathematical model of the brain’s basal ganglia—the part that helps us decide what to do next. Depending on how much simulated dopamine (the neurotransmitter in the brain that controls movement, behaviour, mood and learning) is dialled into the mathematical model, the brainbot responds differently.

Too much, and the machine has trouble suppressing unwanted actions, or tries to do two incompatible things at once—like patients with Huntington’s disease, Tourette’s syndrome or schizophrenia. Too little digital dopamine, and the machine has difficulty deciding how to move—like patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Mr Warwick’s team at Reading has now gone a stage further. Instead of using a computer model of part of the brain as a controller, the group’s new “animat” (part animal, part material) relies solely on nerve cells from an actual brain.

Signals from a culture of rodent brain cells in a tiny dish are picked up by an array of electrodes and used to drive a robot’s wheels. The animat’s biological brain learns how and when to steer away from obstacles by interpreting sensory data fed to it by the robot’s sonar array. And it does this without outside help or an electronic computer to crunch the data.

… Neuroengineers build tools that think for themselves, making decisions the way humans do.

… Over the past decade, a new technology known as “evolvable hardware” has emerged. Like traditional brute-force methods, evolvable machines try billions of different possibilities. But the difference is they then continually crop and refine their search algorithm—the sequence of logical steps they take to find a solution.

… The evolvable concept, pioneered by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex in Britain, has led to some astonishing results. Dr Thompson’s original “proof of principle” experiment—a design for a simple analogue circuit that could tell the difference between two audio tones—worked brilliantly, but to this day no one knows quite why. Left to run for some 4,000 iterations on its own, the genetic algorithm somehow found ways of exploiting physical quirks in the semiconductor material that researchers still don’t fully comprehend.

Similarly, John Koza at Stanford University has been using genetic algorithms to devise analog circuits that are so smart they infringe on patents awarded to human inventors. Mr Koza’s so-called “invention machine” has even earned patents of its own—the first non-human inventor to do so.

How soon before machines become smarter than people? The way self-programming machines are evolving today suggests they will probably begin to match human intelligence in perhaps little over a decade. By 2030, they might look down on us—if we’re lucky—as endangered critters like the blue whale or polar bear and accept we are worth keeping around for our genetic diversity.

But what if visionaries like Mr Gibson are right, and we embrace the bionic future? With our plug-in bio-processors and learning modules, perhaps we’ll be able to outsmart the machines—or, at least, become indistinguishable from them.

2030?! That’s damned early. Even Kurzweil usually says 2045, I’m hoping for 2090, and Aaronson things 2300.

There’s nothing above I haven’t known about or written of. For example, four years ago an organic rat neural network “flew” an F-22. So why did I say 2090 instead of, say, 2030?

It might be wishful thinking, since I fear this sort of inevitable Singularity is the most likely explanation of the Fermi Paradox. I want to put this well beyond my lifespan.

Alas, I may not be giving enough credit to the animal option. It’s “cheating”, bypassing much of the complexity of the traditional approaches that more or less build the AI from spare parts and a plan. Cheating works.

On the bright side, if they’re right then McCain/Palin won’t be able to do any lasting harm to humanity. Which is, of course, the apathetic behavior Aaronson opposes.

A good day for the US Coast Guard – and for some fishermen

My son has some things in common with Christopher Marino. At one point in his life he had a moderately compulsive interest in the Coast Guard. I read him several Coast Guard books, including one we are very fond of (Martha J LaGuardia-Kotite).

I was left with considerable sympathy for the US Coast Guard. I think this kind of story gets the crews out of bed – even in the middle of the night.

This story will be often told …

Disney motto saved dad, son in sea - People: Tales of survival - MSNBC.com

Walter, Christopher and Angela were enjoying a family day at the beach at the Ponce Inlet south of Daytona Sept. 6. Late in the afternoon, Christopher was swimming near his father when he got caught in a current, and his dad paddled rapidly to retrieve him.

“We were both just sucked out,” Marino told Lauer. “The forces just took us out so quickly, it totally took me by surprise.”

… On the beach, Angela could no longer see her father and brother and quickly called 911. The Coast Guard and the Volusia County Beach Patrol launched a search-and-rescue effort, but were unable to locate the pair and called off the search when darkness set in.

Meanwhile, Walter and Christopher treaded water while looking at each other face to face. Christopher, who is largely nonverbal, “watches a lot of Disney movies,” explained his father, and Walter kept calling out Christopher’s favorite Disney lines, including the “Infinity” phrase.

But as the hours ticked off in the dark night, Walter could no longer hear his son. He tried to reconcile himself to the worst.

“I knew in my mind he was gone,” Marino told Lauer. “The only thing that got me through was I could not lose my daughter. I could not let my daughter lose her brother and her father on the same day.”

Around 7:30 a.m. the next morning, fishermen spotted a glint in the water from Walter’s necklace and rescued him. With the fate of Christopher still unknown at the time, Walter had little hope of finding his son alive.

“The Coast Guard asked me if I wanted to be evacuated to a helicopter to go to the hospital, or stay on the boat and continue the search,” he said. “I stayed on the search. They asked me if I wanted to be above or below — I chose to be below, because I knew in my mind that Christopher was gone and I didn’t want to see my son floating facedown.”

After nearly two hours, the Coast Guard asked Marino to come on deck. “That was my Green Mile,” he told Lauer. “I thought they wanted me to come up and identify the body. Those three steps, I just needed help to get to the top.

I got up there and they pointed to the helicopter and said, ‘See that helicopter over there? That has your son, and he’s fine.’

“I never kissed so many Coast Guard men in my life!”

Christopher was picked up some 3 miles from where his father was found, and some 8 miles from shore…

That was one heck of a rescue. One man found by chance, and then, knowing the currents and where Walter was found, the Guard picked his son out of a vast ocean.

I think Walter should hang on to that lucky necklace.

Explaining twitter, facebook and myspace to gomer geeks

The NYT Magazine article: I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com and the Scoble-selected blog post from Lightspeed venture partners try to explain twitter and the like to gomer geeks.

It’s all about intimacy.

Hmm. Problem is, we gomer geeks don’t want to know what our spouse’s moment-to-moment thoughts are – much less our friends (sorry Jim, Andrew, Bob, Peter …). I’d like to know where my parents and my kids are, and (at their respective ages), maybe what/how they’re doing .. but that’s about it.

Younger people differ. They actually seek intimacy. My generation overflows with intimacy.

I suspect this will be a young-thing rather than a generational thing – meaning today’s 10 year olds will be keen in 8 years, but today’s 25 year olds will be much less keen when they approach middle-age.

Ok, so I’m not so sure women won’t stick with it longer …

BBC's impossibly slow "most popular now" site

I love the idea of the BBC ranking its huge output by email and readership frequencies. The NYT has done this exceedingly well with its 'most read' and 'most blogged' ratings.

Trouble is, the BBC's glitzy web 2.0 "Most Popular Now" site is achingly, impossibly, slow.

The non-graphical version doesn't appear at all

Give me fast web 1.0 any time.

I'll see if their RSS version is any better.

Speed, speed, speed ... give me speed ...

Fannie and Freddie: where should they go now?

I heard Senator Chris Dodd, head of the banking committee, being interviewed on NPR this morning.

He sounds like he's really going to miss that F&F lobbying money; the new entity isn't allowed to lobby. He won't be the only one.

Dodd believes the GOP want to liquidate F&F. He feels that will end 30 year fixed-rate mortgages in the US, pointing out that other nations don't have them.

I believe him. So now we get into interesting questions -- should we be subsidizing home purchases and creating 30 year fixed rate mortgages?

I'd like to hear DeLong and Krugman discuss this. I assume that this is supposed to be a form of income redistribution, but does it really work? Doesn't subsidizing loans also increase asset prices -- thereby reducing the initial purchase advantage?

If we want to distribute wealth, either for enlightened self-interest reasons of national peace and prosperity or beneficent reasons of social good, is this the best way to use our resources? Would we be better to liquidate F&F, forego the 30 year fixed rate mortgage, and instead shift funding to education or health care?

The answers to the questions depend very much on who's in charge.

If it's McCain/Palin, then the answers would be to keep F&F. They'd simply transfer the liquidation earnings to their financial backers -- the very wealthy.

If it's Obama/Biden I'd trust them to liquidate F&F and shift the subsidies to education or health care.

Aaronson critiques Kurzweil and the 2045 Singularity

Kurzweil's desperate drive to live to 2045 and guaranteed immortality makes him easy to mock. Scot Aaronson, one of my favorite science bloggers, avoids the easy mockery, and writes a respectful review of why he things The Singularity Is Far - by which he means at least a century away - and probably after 2300.

The topic is not entirely academic. If you believe that artificial sentience bounded only by physics will transform the world beyond recognition by 2045, you might not bother with everyday trivia like peaceful prosperity for China, global warming management, and sustaining pluralistic democracy in America.

Like Aaronson I share areas of agreement with Kurzweil (from The Singularity is Near) ...

I find myself in agreement with Kurzweil on three fundamental points. Firstly, that whatever purifying or ennobling qualities suffering might have, those qualities are outweighed by suffering’s fundamental suckiness....

Secondly, there’s nothing bad about overcoming nature through technology...

Thirdly, were there machines that pressed for recognition of their rights with originality, humor, and wit, we’d have to give it to them. And if those machines quickly rendered humans obsolete, I for one would salute our new overlords. In that situation, the denialism of John Searle would cease to be just a philosophical dead-end, and would take on the character of xenophobia, resentment, and cruelty...

Yeah, Searle annoys me too.

My only objection to Aaronson's summary is I'd dispense with the originality, humor and wit requirements-- I don't demand those of humans so it's hardly fair to demand it of non-humans. Also, if obsolete means "ready for recycling" I'm not so objective as to welcome that transition. Indeed, I find prospect of recycling cause to hope that the Singularity really is beyond 2200.

Aaronson (and I) are skeptical of Kurzweil's exponential projections though...

... Everywhere he looks, Kurzweil sees Moore’s-Law-type exponential trajectories—not just for transistor density, but for bits of information, economic output, the resolution of brain imaging, the number of cell phones and Internet hosts, the cost of DNA sequencing … you name it, he’ll plot it on a log scale. ... he knows that every exponential is just a sigmoid (or some other curve) in disguise. Nevertheless, he fully expects current technological trends to continue pretty much unabated until they hit fundamental physical limits.

I’m much less sanguine. Where Kurzweil sees a steady march of progress interrupted by occasional hiccups, I see a few fragile and improbable victories against a backdrop of malice, stupidity, and greed—the tiny amount of good humans have accomplished in constant danger of drowning in a sea of blood and tears, as happened to so many of the civilizations of antiquity....

So there's a bright side in Governor Palin et al's desire to reverse the Enlightenment and join bin Laden in the middle ages -- it delays the Singularity.

And some people think I'm too negative.

In any case, even if we don't destroy civilization by electing McCain/Palin (maybe India will save civilization even then), my personal computer technology doesn't feel like it's on an exponential growth curve. It feels about as slow as it did eight years ago (though that's partly because of the crapware corporations now install on machines). I think we've gone sigmoid well ahead of Kurzweil's timeline. In fact, the book was written five years ago -- I think we've already fallen off his roadmap.

Aaronson's essay makes a quiet digression into one of my favorite topics -- the Fermi Paradox (inevitably tied these days to the Singularity). Note here that Scott is a certified deep thinker about Bayesian reasoning (italics mine)...

... The fourth reason is the Doomsday Argument. Having digested the Bayesian case for a Doomsday conclusion, and the rebuttals to that case, and the rebuttals to the rebuttals, what I find left over is just a certain check on futurian optimism. ... Suppose that all over the universe, civilizations arise and continue growing exponentially until they exhaust their planets’ resources and kill themselves out. In that case, almost every conscious being brought into existence would find itself extremely close to its civilization’s death throes. If—as many believe—we’re quickly approaching the earth’s carrying capacity, then we’d have not the slightest reason to be surprised by that apparent coincidence. To be human would, in the vast majority of cases, mean to be born into a world of air travel and Burger King and imminent global catastrophe. It would be like some horrific Twilight Zone episode, with all the joys and labors, the triumphs and setbacks of developing civilizations across the universe receding into demographic insignificance next to their final, agonizing howls of pain. I wish reading the news every morning furnished me with more reasons not to be haunted by this vision of existence.

Hmm. Scott has seemed a bit depressed lately. Following American politics will do that to a person.

I'd argue that the Doomsday Argument makes the case for a (sometime) Singularity however. Global warming won't wipe out humanity, and neither would nuclear war or even most bioweapons. We're tougher than cockroaches, which, I read recently, only thrive in the US because of our delightful garbage. It would take something really catastrophic and inescapable to do us in. Something that would likewise eliminate every sentient biological entity. Something like an inevitable Singularity ...

Of course that will wipe us out just as thoroughly in 2240 as in 2040, so I wouldn't use that argument to advance our date with destiny.

Aaronson concludes with one of the more interesting critiques of the Singularity thesis. He says that while it may well happen someday (strong AI that is), the result probably won't be incomprehensible ...

As you may have gathered, I don’t find the Singulatarian religion so silly as not to merit a response. Not only is the “Rapture of the Nerds” compatible with all known laws of physics; if humans survive long enough it might even come to pass. The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs (or mice, or fish, or snails). After all, we might similarly expect that there should be models of computation as far beyond Turing machines as Turing machines are beyond finite automata. But in the latter case, we know the intuition is mistaken. There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster. Now, it’s clear that a human who thought at ten thousand times our clock rate would be a pretty impressive fellow. But if that’s what we’re talking about, then we don’t mean a point beyond which history completely transcends us, but “merely” a point beyond which we could only understand history by playing it in extreme slow motion.

So Aaronson's saying that faster isn't the same as incomprehensible. He is a world expert on the physics of computation, so it's not surprising that he reminds us of those limits. Kurzweil and Vinge know that too though, albeit not at Scott's level of detail.

So what do I think? On the one hand I don't think we're anywhere near computational physics limits, so I could believe that a sentient AI would be far more than Aaronson at warp speed. On the other hand, I could also believe that at a certain level of sentience all other sentience may be more or less imaginable -- and that some humans are there now.

I like Scott's essay -- probably because it fits my prejudices about "2045". It's nice to be affirmed by a true expert. I might be more worried about 2100 than he is however. It may come down to how discouraging the RNC is ...

... while I believe the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s “near” (where “near” means before 2045, or even 2300). I see a world that really did change dramatically over the last century, but where progress on many fronts (like transportation and energy) seems to have slowed down rather than sped up; a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans, and supercharging its climate; a world where technology is often powerless to solve the most basic problems, millions continue to die for trivial reasons, and democracy isn’t even clearly winning over despotism; a world that finally has a communications network with a decent search engine but that still hasn’t emerged from the tribalism and ignorance of the Pleistocene. And I can’t helping thinking that, before we transcend the human condition and upload our brains to computers, a reasonable first step might be to bring the 17^th-century Enlightenment to the 98% of the world that still hasn’t gotten the message.

I agree with the sentiment ... but there's a curious slip in here. Aaronson is saying that a healthy Enlightenment is an important step towards a sentient AI Singularity, but he's already established that the Singularity is unlikely to be an unmitigated gift. It could be an extinction event instead.

In which case the logical thing to do is vote for Palin/McCain. Down with the Enlightenment!

Update 9/9/08: A somewhat similar response to mine from a Singularity student. There's a bit of synchronicity, though where I write "prosperous and peaceful China" they write "Chinese military dominance". A revealing distinction I suspect. I guess I fall between Aaronson and Hanson on the Singularity spectrum, which means we all have a fair bit in common.

Exercise cannot control obesity gene associated weight gain

The title on this SciAm summary is silly (emphases mine) ...

Do I look fat in these genes? Exercise can cancel out effects of 'heavy-weight' DNA: Scientific American Blog:

... Physically active people who carry gene mutations linked to obesity are no more likely to be overweight than those without the variants -- as long as they exercise at least three hours a day...

Exercising 3+ hours a day is not compatible with life in a post-industrial world. If these results turned out be generalizable to a reasonable portion of the obese population (big if), then we'd know that exercise won't control our expanding (sorry) obesity problem. We already know diet doesn't work, so here's hoping for great drugs ...

Either that, or we get rid of our cars ...

Update: see a good comment critiquing this post