The evolutionary history of minds

Two years ago, responding to a post by John Hawks on unique evolutionary events and their relationship to the Drake Equation, I praised Stephen Baxter's 2004 book Evolution. The book never got the fame I thought it deserved, but I'm pleased to see it's still in print.

Baxter does a fantastic job imaging a language and tool using velociraptor-like animal in, I think, the late Cretaceous. Alas, these obligatory carnivores wipe out their primary food supplies -- an ominous precedent for later chapters.

Ever since Baxter I've wondered how many sentient species have preceded us. Certainly there are several alive today, perhaps including canids. How many were rich language users? Ahh, that's harder. We, by which I include our Neandertal brethren, are the only rich language users we know of. How many technocentric species? Again, we know of only one; if there'd been anything like us before we'd have found their signature in the ice cores.

So we do seem somewhat unique, though it's puzzling that we should be. Why not others in the eons of evolution before us?

It's a great puzzle, and Scientific American addresses it as a part of their homage to Darwin series ...

One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom: Scientific American:

.... Beginning in the 1980s, the field of comparative neuroanatomy experienced a renaissance. In the intervening decades evolutionary biologists had learned a great deal about vertebrate evolutionary history, and they developed new and effective methods of applying Darwin’s concept of the tree of life to analyze and interpret their findings. It is now apparent that a simple linear hierarchy cannot adequately account for the evolution of brains or of intelligence. The oldest known multicellular animal fossils are about 700 million years old. By the Cambrian period, about 520 million years ago, the animal kingdom had branched into about 35 major groups, or phyla, each with its own distinctive body plan. As a separate branch of the tree of life, each lineage continued to evolve and diversify independently of the others. Complex brains evolved independently in multiple phyla, notably among the cephalopod mollusks of the phylum Mollusca and, of course, among various groups of vertebrates. Vertebrate evolution has likewise involved repeated branching, with complex brains evolving from simpler brains independently along numerous branches....

It's a long essay, but worth reading. See also a 2004 post on the rapid and ongoing changes to the human mind and brain. I particularly appreciate the cephalopod reference -- Sentient squids are a favorite topic of science fiction of course ...

Are fluorescent bulbs really more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs?

Well, of course they are …

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs : ENERGY STAR

ENERGY STAR qualified bulbs use about 75 percent less energy than standard incandescent bulbs …

…Produce about 75 percent less heat…

Or are they?

It’s been a cold December in Lake Wobegon. The heat is on all the time.

Our incandescent bulbs are 100% efficient now. They give light and heat, and we need both. Our fluorescents are equally efficient of course, they also give light and a bit of heat. We need that heat too.

True, we don’t need heat all year long. There are a few weeks during the summer when we run air conditioners, though not usually when the lights are on. For several months the heat is indeed a waste.

So fluorescents are more energy efficient than incandescents – on average. In Minnesota though, that’s only true on average, and the benefit is much less than 75%. Maybe 25%.

So maybe they only save us $10 in electricity costs over their lifetime, versus $30 in Florida. That means we don’t get much of a payback from switching, and given the hassles of dealing with broken fluorescents they’re probably not worthwhile for Minnesotans.

Of course we’ll have to switch in 2012 with the rest of the nation, but there’s no reason to jump the gun …

The Palm Nova – doomed from the start?

The Palm Nova is getting a bit more news lately, with rumor of a CES showing in a few weeks. There’s not a lot of information out; Google suggests this May 2008 posting (emphases mine):

Palm Nova OS Details - Treonauts

Asked why Palm was still developing its own OS, Colligan stated that “We’re focused on executing our own system, mostly because we really believe that to create the most compelling solution it should be an integrated package much like we started with the Palm OS and doing the original Palm Pilots: we did the operating system, we did the hardware and we did the whole synching architecture and the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days…

… That ‘next generation’ Palm 2.0 OS will slot in between the Centro and Treo lines under a new ‘prosumer’ brand that’s yet to be decided, Colligan explains.  “We’re going to continue to look at those three line areas – consumer, prosumer and enterprise…

Supposedly the Nova is going to aim at people who are shut out of the corporate Exchange Server environment (my whimsical guess -- 90% BlackBerry, 9% Windows Mobile, 1% iPhone) but are frustrated by the iPhone’s pathetic productivity offerings (weak to nonexistent home/work calendar sync solution, no tasks, truncated calendar and contact notes, no cut/copy/paste, etc).

So what will Palm do for the desktop? Colligan is very clear that they need to own the end-to-end solution, and he’s 100% right about that. He also says “the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days”. That’s ominously clear – they’ll do a web service, not a desktop app.

So here’s the killer problem – how are they going to get at corporate data? Corporations are even more possessive of their data than they were 10 years ago. On the other hand, what good is a prosumer solution without corporate data integration?

Will Palm provide a tool for sucking data out of Outlook through the back door? Corporations aren’t going to be happy if it’s going from Outlook to a cloud store – even if the cloud store is theoretically more secure than a phone *. If it’s going via a cable from Outlook to a hardware device it’s easier for corporations to look the other way – but not if the ultimate destination has to be a cloud store.

On the other hand, it seems that nobody remembers how to create significant desktop apps any more – so there’s no way Palm will deliver a desktop – especially when Colligan has said the modern desktop is the web.

So the Palm Nova has a very big business problem – access to the corporate data store. Without it they don’t have a hope, but so far they seem to be shut out.

I want the Nova to be a raging success. We Mac iPhone users are desperate for someone, anyone, to put the metallic taste of impending doom in Apple’s mouth.  Alas, it seems Apple will have nothing to fear from the Nova.

* In reality of course most users choose pathetic passwords, and cloud stores are still password secured, so corporate fears are well-founded.

Technological singularity - the trans-Pacific submarine cable

Submarine cables have to cross things like the Mariana Trench.

If you asked most people when the first submarine communications cable crossed the Pacific, I suspect most would guess sometime in the 1970s, as a replacement for satellite links.

They're much older than that ...

Submarine communications cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first attempt at laying a transatlantic telegraph cable was promoted by Cyrus West Field, who persuaded British industrialists to fund and lay one in 1858. However, the technology of the day was not capable of supporting the project, it was plagued with problems from the outset, and was in operation for only a month. Subsequent attempts in 1865 and 1866 with the world's largest steamship, the SS Great Eastern, used a more advanced technology and produced the first successful transatlantic cable...

... Submarine cable across the Pacific ... was completed in 1902–03, linking the US mainland to Hawaii in 1902 and Guam to the Philippines in 1903...

The American civil war, ended in 1865. Forty years later there was a telegraph cable across the Pacific.

It's hard for me to fathom how much the world was changing between 1845 and 1914. I suppose the closest thing today would have to be the rise of China, but that modern rise does not include any comparable technological transformations.

I don't imagine our Future Shock could compare to theirs.

Britannica Online's suicidal site redesign

I'm fond of Britannica Online (example). We've subscribed for eons.

Sometime in the past year, some misguided executive decided that they needed a site refresh.

Now it's heavy on Flash and fancy layouts. Problem is, they don't seem to render properly anywhere. I have the most luck with Firefox, but IE 7 has serious problems.

iPhone? Surely you jest.

At the moment the main page shows me a dark navy blue square with Firefox 3+. Something Flashy, no doubt.

I doubt they were in great shape before this happened. Maybe this was some kind of suicidal move, like torching a warehouse to get the insurance money.

Sad.

Krugman declares 2010 will be good. Markets rally.

The tide has turned. Even as I write billions prepare to pour into the market, because Krugman has written ....

Krugman - Life Without Bubbles - NYTimes.com

... Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010....

Optimistic?! Krugman?!

Oh yeah baby, let's get that bubble going ...

Buy, buy, buy!

Ok, so there's more in the column ...

... In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis...

The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either...

So what will support the economy if cautious consumers and humbled homebuilders aren’t up to the job?

A few months ago a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, on point as always, offered one possible answer: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.” Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment...

... it may take a lot longer than many people think before the U.S. economy is ready to live without bubbles. And until then, the economy is going to need a lot of government help...

Hmm. A boom in business investment? Does that mean my most favored recent meme might get traction?

Amidst all the chaos, this is an oddly attractive time to be starting a small business -- if one can get health insurance (hint, hint).

Just remember, we're not done with bubbles. We have a lot to work out* before the US, and even the world economy, is out of the ICU ...

*See also ...

1. Complexity collapse
2. Disintermediating Wall Street
3. The future of the publicly traded company
4. The role of the deadbeats
5. Marked!
   

Why middle-aged habits form

Not good habits, not bad habits, just the ones that grow, like parking spots, the home of the winter hat, and so on.

These habits form because, especially if enjoys and endures a certain sort of family existence, by middle-middle age life can become significantly complicated.

At the same time one's memory structure is not improving -- which is a polite way of saying something else.

And thus one acquires the cage of habits that will, for better and worse, flourish and endure.

I need more sunlight.

Shallow thought of the moment

It's never about one thing, it's always about everything*.

* Everything that's causally connected that is.

What can I do with Twitter, and is it CB Radio redux?

I'm still trying to figure out the upside of Twitter for me. It looks potentially useful as a way to get availability/status information and to synchronize a loosely-coupled distributed entity, but mostly it seems like a oddly constrained form of entertainment.

Being a proto-gomer, that reminded me of something ...

ConnectMe Networks: Twitter vs CB Radio: What Makes These Mobile Services So Popular

... CB radio was a lot like Twitter: in the late 70s and early 80s, millions of people bought these radios initially because it allowed them to communicate with each other to locate cheap gas and to notify others of speed traps. But it fell victim to its own popularity: because of the millions of users jamming onto the grid, channels became incredibly noisy and communication became next to impossible. Once people started to use their radios less frequently, it opened the door for a competing technology: the mobile phone...

CB radio lasted about 4-5 years as a popular movement and AOL chat rooms were good for 10 years, so I give Twitter 3-8 years as a recreational/social medium. Good for some, uninteresting for me.

The useful part of Twitter has to do with the people synchronization problem, the ongoing limits of calendar integration, and the business quirks driving the SMS/IM wars. These things look like they may take years to sort out, during which time Twitter can morph as needed.

CB Radio didn't have that morphing potential -- it ended as it started. So Twitter isn't CB radio, or at least the people synchronization broadcast/asynchronous receipt part of it isn't.

So when might it be useful for me? That's hard to figure, given that so far SMS/IM is only useful between my wife and I, and even then we're limited by Apple's craven refusal to provide Google Talk/Chat or any other app with instant messaging push services.

I think when our children have cell phones and are more independent, or when both my wife and I have phones with working push notification (iPhones if Apple ever caves), or if my work were to change dramatically, I'll have a real use for Twitter.

Not just yet though.

National Academies of Science survey -- very short

The NAS wants to know what you'd like to learn about.

What Matters Most to You? is a VERY short survey. Please take a moment to complete. I added a request for "autism and cognitive disorders" as a write-in category.

Marriage and civil unions - American insularity is astounding

Americans get endlessly agitated about Gay Marriage and Civil Unions. There are reams of editorials like this one ...

Editorial - Separate and Not Equal - NYTimes.com

.... Civil unions are an inadequate substitute for marriage. Creating a separate, new legal structure to confer some benefits on same-sex couples neither honors American ideals of fairness, nor does it grant true equality. The results are clearly visible in New Jersey, which continues to deny same-sex couples some of the tangible civil benefits that come with marriage....

So, amidst all the sturm und drang, does anyone ever bother to ask what other nations do?

No. Of course not. That would be %$@% un-American.

Sometimes I wonder why I ever became an American citizen.

Emily and I were "married" in Quebec about 23 years ago. More importantly, we were civil-unioned.

You see, in Quebec of 23 years ago, "marriage" was a religious thing. You could be married by the Catholic Church or the United Federation of Wombats; both were equally legally meaningless.

The legal union was a civil agreement with the state. It was the civil agreement that got you rights, privileges and obligations.

Duh.

We need to make "marriage" the province of religions, and make "civil union" the contract with the state. We can grandfather in everyone who's currently "married", but then all future legally meaningful unions, including straight and gay unions, are civil unions.

Marriage is then up to the religious orders, and it then has no significance beyond the religious domain. So the Church of the Endlessly Recreational can do marriages, and, heck, so can the Baptists. Who cares -- it has no legal importance.

The answer to the Gay Marriage wars is to make all unions Civil, and separate Church and State.

Damn obvious.

A classification of Ponzi schemes

The NYT has published a classification of Ponzi schemes.

I have a few quibbles with the piece. While the 'Music Man' was a con man who meant to cut and run, he wasn't running a Ponzi scheme. Also, not all "cut and run" scams are small bit -- the Albanian, Philipino and Columbian, scams were massive. Lastly, the relationship between Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing businesses deserves more mention.

Oh, and I've one other quibble. I'll save that one for the end ...

A Scheme With No Off Button - NYTimes.com

Mathematically speaking, Ponzi schemes are doomed. They work by bringing in new investors to pay off old ones. In pure form, there’s never any actual business activity; the money just rolls backward from ever-increasing numbers of investors to keep up the appearance of profits. This means the scheme requires an infinite supply of new suckers....

...Based on historical examples relayed by a few biographers, historians and finance experts, the exit strategies seem to fall into four general categories:

CUT AND RUN These Ponzi schemers, a subset of the “Music Man” breed of professional swindler, are the small-time crooks, the snake-oil salesmen. They plan to rip off everyone in River City, hop on a train, change identity, and then start over, from the top, in the next town...

If you’re well enough connected to create a large-scale Ponzi scheme, though, you’re probably too well-connected to be able to, or perhaps even want to, cut yourself loose. Charles Ponzi himself passed up chances early in the 20th century to sneak back to his Italian homeland unnoticed....

TURN (OR RETURN) THE BUSINESS INTO SOMETHING LEGITIMATE This group is likely to have started out with some hope for legitimacy. They solicit seed money for a brilliant investment idea, but the idea falls through. Rather than declare failure, they recruit new investors to pay off the old ones.

The fraud is just temporary, the swindlers tell themselves. They delude themselves into thinking they’ll come up with another, better idea some day.

This appears to have been Mr. Ponzi’s strategy; he had grand plans for international postal arbitrage but couldn’t make the logistics work. “He truly thought he could eventually turn around and go legitimate,” Mr. Zuckoff said.

This exit strategy pretty much always fails because the schemers are looking for the big scalp — and there’s never an investment profitable enough to fill that deepening pocket of debt.

NO EXIT These schemers, usually from relatively humble backgrounds, are deeply insecure. They have felt like impostors their whole lives, whether in the country club or on the trading floor, says James Walsh, author of “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.” Expecting exposure for something, sometime, somewhere, they rationalize their fraudulent behavior. They delay the inevitable as long as they can — and live well until they get caught.

GET ELECTED TO PARLIAMENT After scamming millions of Russians in the 1990s, Sergei Mavrodi promised his investors a taxpayer bailout if they elected him to the Duma. Upon election, he received parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

Admittedly, this exit strategy has limited applicability. It didn’t even work very long for Mr. Mavrodi, who landed in prison when his immunity was revoked.

The details of Mr. Madoff’s scheme are unclear, though he is accused, in court documents, of having described it as a Ponzi scheme. Some experts guess that, given his business’s longevity, he may have hoped to return to legitimacy one day.

Most Ponzi schemes last a year at most, says Utpal Bhattacharya, an Indiana University finance professor. (Ponzi’s lasted just nine months.) So it seems likely that Mr. Madoff, an investment manager since 1960, started out legitimate or semi-legitimate. People in that position sometimes foolishly think they can hide a one-time loss with new investors’ money, and make up for it with a big gamble later.

In other words, Ponzi schemers don’t necessarily start out as such, and as sophisticated as they are, they may not consciously recognize that they have created one. They delude themselves into thinking the ploy is just a stopgap measure, an attempt to hide a loss until they can — once again — dream up something brilliant.

My last quibble is that the author is far too sanguine about the distinction between a scam and, say, a start-up company. Lots of start-ups stutter, and look for money from secondary investors. They're not expected to make money, so they don't have to lie about revenues. They just have find a way to transition from their original, failing, plan to a new one -- funded by new investors.

In the real world these boundaries are labile ...

Oddities of popular posts

Based on comments, two of my most often appreciated posts:

• Gordon's Notes: Duct tape and warts: how the HECK does it work?
• Gordon's Tech: MacBook fan was roaring. Why?

The first is interesting from an anecdotal medical perspective.

The second is an aspect of one the most annoying problems with OS X -- device drivers are often very badly behaved. It comes up at the top of several Google searches on the topic, I get a comment every other day.

I've no way of predicting what's going to be popular.

WordPress's possibly related posts -- I want this from Blogger

Last July I wrote that I really wanted Blogger to support backlinks.

Well, Blogger still hasn't done anything. Meanwhile, I'm seeing more WordPress blogs using their "possibly related" feature.

Possibly an Announcement -- WordPress.com

... In a feature we’re calling possibly related posts we’ll now try to show posts related to yours a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.

The result is a handful of links that should provide you and your visitors something interesting to check out. On blogs that cover the same topics frequently related posts could cause a 5-10% increase in traffic overnight. You could also start to see traffic from lots of other blogs. It’s a bit of an experiment, and we’ll be tweaking it a lot based on your feedback and the data that we collect once everything is live.

Grrrrr. This feature is core to my memory extension strategy [1].

I want a Google Blogger "possibly related posts" feature that follows links and tags and, heck, textual analysis to create entries -- and that lets me choose whether to restrict to my own domains or open it up.

What do I need to do? I'm turning blue ...

[1] If Blogger label views had feeds I'd be able to create meta-tags that spanned Gordon's Notes and Tech. By the way.

Understanding the Collapse of '08 - the role of the deadbeats

I keep coming across the meme that the root cause of the Collapse of '08 was that the banks made loans to people who couldn't afford to repay them. To deadbeats, in other words.

Sometimes the implications is that this was because the banks were stupid, or evil but mistaken, and other times it's blamed on federal rules avowedly intended to end racist lending practices and to reduce poverty.

I thought stories like Michael Lewis's would slow that meme, but they haven't. So even though I wrote (emphases mine) ...

Gordon's Notes: Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God.

1. We need to close the rating agencies down. Now.
2. When you give 99% of the human race money and power, they cannot imagine that they don't deserve it. They are convinced they are brilliant. I know I would.
   
3. The part where shorting the bad loans with credit-default swaps enabled the generation of 'virtual' bad loans involving real money is mind-boggling.
4. I don't think this was caused by poor black people getting too many loans. Do you?...

The meme persists. Funny about that.

So let me try again.

Imagine that someone had built a massive amplifier. Huge. It takes anything it hears and it boosts it a thousand times.

Next to it, Yo-Yo Ma plays the Cello.

Everyone is happy.

Until the sound guy hits the wrong switch and the speakers connect to the microphone. The feedback loop blows the speakers, the audience, and the nationwide auditorium sky high.

So who's to blame? The sound guy? The speakers? Or the idiots who built a system that was built to self-destruct?

I guess you can tell what I think.

We'd built the mother of all firewall-free feedback loops. All it took was one thing to go wrong, and the entire setup was going to blow. If it hadn't been the sound guy, it would have been a short in the wires. The explosion was going to come -- one way or another.

Don't blame the sound guy. He's dead too.

See also:

1. Complexity collapse
2. Disintermediating Wall Street
3. The future of the publicly traded company
4. The role of the deadbeats
5. Marked!