American crisis – imagining a way out

Scott (Dilbert) Adams can’t imagine any way American will survive its 21st century budget crisis.

 

This betrays a certain lack of historical perspective. We’ve been through worse, other nations have been through much worse. Compared to the American Civil War, the Black Death, or even the many versions of “great” Depressions we’re in pretty good shape.

 

Not that success is guaranteed, but it’s quite easy to imagine.

 

As a starting point, I’d suggest some subset of this list would suffice:

1. Political reform. I’ve got another post brewing on this. Fourteen years ago I satirized “public incorporation” of representatives, but now we have corporate persons with political rights. We’re in trouble. Many current Senators appear to have early dementia, and our political candidates are often lousy. We need to rethink who we elect, how we elect them, and how old they can be. We should draw on ideas from professional training and licensing and from jury selection.
2. Taxes. We’re going to raise taxes – a lot. We should do a Carbon Tax. We will do a VAT equivalent. We’ll do “death” taxes – again.
3. Immigration - Oh Canada: Canada figured this one out years ago. We have too many decrepit boomers. We  need to balance my generation with vigorous, energetic highly talented youth. So let them in based on professional and academic qualifications and business guarantees.
4. Inflation: 3% should help whittle down those foreign debts. Don’t say you weren’t warned China.
5. Give up on the Empire. The Soviets couldn’t afford their empire. Guess what? We can’t either.
6. Delay Dementia: We’re all going to have to work longer, but we can’t all bag groceries. For one thing, that job’s going to a robot someday. Unfortunately, normal brain aging means most of us won’t be good for much more by the time we’re 72. We need a ton of research into slowing the inevitable onset of dementia. (Ok, so if you die it’s not inevitable.)

Note that my list doesn’t include “controlling health care costs”. That one’s simply inevitable, so I don’t bother with it.

In Our Time archives - EVERY EPISODE from Oct 15 1998 onwards

Wow.

You know, this really did deserve more than just a small aside on the recently redesigned IOT web site...

BBC - Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time

...For the first time, listen online to every episode ever broadcast, from Aristotle to the History of Zero...

The list includes many, perhaps all, of the legendary lost episodes...

... These ‘lost editions’ include topics such as Science and Religion, Childhood, Consciousness, The End of History and Quantum Gravity, and they’re discussed by guests including Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen and the sadly deceased Stephen Jay Gould. The term ‘treasure trove’ is bandied around quite casually these days, but for anyone who enjoys In Our Time, these transcripts are very valuable...

I found Quantum Gravity (RealMedia only) from Feb 22, 2001 - but they "by year" list currently only goes back to 2004. So they've got some bugs to work out.

By walking backwards from Quantum Gravity, however, I was able to locate Evolutionary Psychology (Nov 2000), Imagination and Consciousness June 2000, The Renaissance (June 2000), Death (May 2000), Grand Unified Theory (incl Brian Greene and Martin Rees, Feb 2000), Climate Change Jan 2000 w/ George Monbiot), Time w/ Lee Smolin Dec 1999, Consciousness w/ Roger Penrose (Nov 1999), Utopia (first one not available to play - Oct 1999 - so it's not every episode) ...

Sometime around 1999 the format drops to 30 minutes and the theme becomes "the 20th century". Then we come to the very first episode (Oct 15, 1998):

WAR IN THE 20TH CENTURY

... In the first programme of a new series examining ideas and events which have shaped thinking in philosophy, religion, science and the arts, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss warfare and human rights in the 20th century. He talks to Michael Ignatieff about the life of one of the 20th century’s leading philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, and to Sir Michael Howard about the 20th century will be remembered; as a century of progress or as one of the most murderous in history.

When we see pictures on television of starving people in war torn areas most of us feel we must ‘do’ something. Where does the feeling that we are in some way responsible for our fellow human beings originate historically? How has technology affected the concept of the Just War? And what are the prospects for world peace as we enter the next century?

With Michael Ignatieff, writer, broadcaster and biographer of Isaiah Berlin; Sir Michael Howard, formerly Regius Professor of History, Oxford University and joint editor of the new Oxford History of the Twentieth Century.

Ignatieff now leads the Liberal Party of Canada.

I have my work cut out for me.

Thank you BBC and thank you Lord Bragg and brave guests. There is still hope for humanity.

Update: ok, so go easy on the hope bit.

Update 3/4/2010: The handful that weren't online have since been added. It appears to now be complete!

Update 3/17/2010: The older material mostly uses RealAudio. That's easy to capture using AudioHijack Pro (you do need to read the manual, see also my old directions). Some of the very oldest material, however, is now rendered with the newish BBC iPlayer. To capture that I had to change the AudioHijack source to "Safari"; AHP switches Safari to 32 bit mode to Hijack the stream. I think I would have to change it back to 64bit myself, but I'm inclined to leave it in 32 bit mode for a while. Quite a bit of software doesn't like 64bit.

Update 5/21/2010: I gave up half way through the 30 minute 1999 (year two) Utopia program. It wasn't exactly bad, but the newer material is much better. I suspect today's guests rise to greater expectations than those of early days, and Melvyn is better at keeping people, including Melvyn, on track. It's also likely that ten years of intense study have moved Melvyn into a different world of background expertise. Incidentally, there's a painful point in the Utopia program where the guests expound on a cheesy essay about a posthuman utopia of the genetically enhanced. Melvyn's guests have almost no science fiction background; their futurist dialogs are pathetically naive. We ought to make post-1980 science fiction reading a requirement for a liberal arts degree.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Good-bye Buzz – for now.

I’ve clicked the link at the bottom of my Gmail account to discontinue Google Buzz.

I was initially enthusiastic because of the value of Google Reader notes – a precursor to Buzz. I hoped Google would fix the notes confusion/neglect while also giving me a better version of Twitter.

Instead, Google’s most senior leadership, the people leading and testing Buzz, blew it big time. They failed to understand the multiplicity of adult identities. All I can guess is that Brin et al are so wealthy and powerful that they have become fundamentally disconnected from mainstream reality.

I gave Google some time to recover, but they’re only playing around the edges. Google remains determined to tie all Buzz discussions directly to a user’s public Google Profile, perhaps as a way to manage spam and to drive search/marketing revenue.

Disappointing, but I’ll be back if they fix it.

Update: Even though I've removed Buzz via Gmail, my Buzz posts still appear on my Google Profile. Not funny Google.

Update 2: I've reversed the procedure that made my Profile searchable. It's non-intuitive, but the "Display my full name..." setting in "edit profile" toggles searchability. When unchecked a Google Search on a my name no longer returns my profile. The profile URL has not changed and prior links still show the public view. That public view still includes Buzz posts even though I've disabled Buzz support in Gmail. I've removed other information from my Google Profile and I expect I'll continue to trim the profile unless Google has a dramatic conversion.

Update 2/17/2010: In depth critique - with cartoon. Credit for focus on the Profile.

The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion

My name is Legion; for we are many many (Mark 5-9).

I am father, brother, in-law, son, and spouse. I am coach. I am volunteer. I am citizen and activist. I am a physician. I am an (adjunct) professor. I am an oddity in a large, conservative, publicly traded corporation. In the corporation I am a team member, known to some customers, occasionally publicly facing, known in various ways and various places. I have other roles and have had many more over time.

I am Legion. So are most middle-aged persons.

Only one person knows all the roles and all of the stories that are not excruciatingly boring (hi Emily).

That’s the problem with Google Buzz, and why my Google Profile doesn’t include my pseudonymous (John Gordon) blog postings or my Google Shared items.

Buzz is tightly linked to my Google Profile, and my Profile is trivially discoverable. I don’t want corporate HR or a customer or business partner to instantly know that I’m a commie pinko Obamafanboy with a dysfunctional Steve Jobs relationship.

I have LinkedIn as my bland corporate face, and, despite Facebook’s innate evilness, a FB profile for friends and family. Inside the corporation I’ve a blog that serves as a limited persona.

We all have many roles, identities, avatars, personae, limited liability personae, characters, facets and so on. The problem with Buzz today is that it’s tied to the Google Profile, and that profile is the closest thing to my unified public face. It crosses boundaries. So it can only hold the limited information channels that are available to all.

Google gets some things right, and a ton of things wrong. They take a statistical, loosely-coupled, evolutionary approach to technology development (the exact inverse of Jobs the Intelligent Designer). I’m looking forward to where Buzz goes, but I’ll be cautious for a time. They can start by giving us more control over what aspects of the overall Buzz connection stream appear on our public profiles.

Update 2/11/10: More on the mess-up. Google really didn't think this through very well. They may end up feeding the families of a number of lawyers. I'm sure they weren't dumb enough to roll this out in the EU, but if they did the fines may be significant.

John Wooden - Pyramid of Success

I'd never heard of John Wooden before I came across this drawing on the wall of an old arena in Northeast Minneapolis (click for full size) ...

Wooden was a basketball coach at UCLA, and he is said to have spent 14 years polishing versions of this drawing (see pdf version). He's 99, so we should here more about him in a year or so.

As a guide to competition one could do worse. There's nothing there about curiosity, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, tolerance, imagination, empathy, creativity, love or questioning authority - it's a guide to battle, not to life.

The Clampi Trojan says …. Get a Mac

A Windows 2003 server machine I use may, or may not, have been infected with the Clampi trojan (ilomi.b or ilomo.c, which depending on your font, may look a lot like llomi or IIlomi or ILomi).

I say “may not”, because the combination of “Windows 2003” and "antivirus” has a high rate of false positive claims that can wreak as much destruction as the antiviral software.

In researching the Clampi trojan Google suggested I read this summary (emphases mine) …

Clampi/Ligats/Ilomo Trojan - Research - SecureWorks

… Clampi’s recent success in infecting victims is accomplished by using domain administrator credentials (either stolen by the Trojan or re-used, or by virtue of the fact that a domain administrator has logged into an already infected system). Once domain administrator privileges are granted, the Trojan uses the SysInternals tool "psexec" to copy itself to all computers on the domain.

Clampi also serves as a proxy server used by criminals to anonymize their activity when logging into stolen accounts…

… Clampi is operated by a serious and sophisticated organized crime group from Eastern Europe and has been implicated in numerous high-dollar thefts from banking institutions. Any user whose system has been infected by Clampi should immediately change any and all passwords used on that system for any websites, but especially financial credentials.

… Most major anti-virus engines should be able to detect Clampi variants; however there is always a delay between a new Trojan release and the detection time.  Given the prevalence and seriousness of the Clampi Trojan, it is recommended that businesses that carry out online banking/financial transactions adopt a strategy to isolate workstations where these activities are carried out from possible Clampi or other data-stealing Trojan infections.

This may include using a dedicated workstation for accessing financial accounts which is isolated from the rest of the local network and the Internet except for the specific financial sites required to be accessed. Since Trojans can also be spread using removable drives, systems should be hardened against auto run-type threats. Businesses may even consider using an alternative operating system for workstations accessing sensitive or financial accounts.

Home Computer User Protection
SecureWorks CTU recommends that home computer users use a computer dedicated only to doing their online banking and bill pay.  They should not use that computer to surf the web and send and receive email, since web exploits and malicious email are two of the key malware infection vectors. 

As an alternative to operating a secure home PC for all important work, home users could, you know, buy a Mac. They would then have one machine to use for everything.[1]

Maybe Apple is funding Clampi development?

--

[1] The Mac’s vast security advantage comes from the “faster friend” security philosophy. When you and a friend are being chased by a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you have be faster than your friend. OS X 10.6 is, in practical terms, fundamentally more secure than XP, but not necessarily theoretically more secure than Microsoft’s very latest foul demon. The big Mac advantage is that the world’s criminals don’t own Apple machines, and have very little interest in targeting Macs as long as the vast majority of banks and corporations run some flavor of Windows. I’ve often wondered, incidentally, if Windows 98 isn’t now a very secure environment. I doubt many Trojans would infect it any more.

How common is Job?

Job was remarkably unlucky.

He was either the victim of serial disasters through random chance, or a pawn in an obscure debate between Lucifer and Yahweh.

Unfortunate either way.

Kind of like me with tech ware. Which is why tomorrow I'll try to figure out why my backup drive has no data on it. (I'm bringing my MacBook into the office. It's relatively trustworthy.)

My tech misfortunes are nuisance rather than tragedy, but they make me wonder how many modern Jobs are out there.

Let us assume that, in middle age, one encounters a reasonable tragedy, such as the loss of a loved one or a major disability about once a year. Less often in a wealthy nation like ours, more often in, say, Haiti. Average, say, 1 week in 50 if we distribute over enough people.

So how many people on earth can we expect to have an uncorrelated tragedy (discounts plagues, etc) once a week for the next 5 weeks in a row?

The answer is (1/50**5) * 8,000,000,000 or 25 people. Over the course of a year the number of people experiencing this is much higher of course (alas, my combinatorial knowledge is too old to calculate this without some study).

There must be a few people, over the course of a lifetime, who will encounter up to 10 uncorrelated tragedies over a 10 week interval. Beyond Job.

It's a big world.

Lessons from my external drive purchase

I needed a SATA drive enclosure in a hurry for a work machine, and a 1TB external drive wouldn't be a bad thing either.

So I ran out to Best Buy and bought an Iomega Prestige 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive for only $10 + taxes more than Amazon.

It's only after I make my purchase that a friend asks "are you sure it's not soldered in"? WTF? Soldered?

Turns out these low end drive/enclosure bundles save pennies on connectors by soldering drives in.

No, this one isn't soldered in. And it's easier to open than the LaCie enclosure I have at home, though it's a bit of tight fit. It's also, of course, an IDE drive (the drive is Samsung, the case fanless, with a metal case that hopefully radiates nicely).

Sigh. Makes sense. Why use a SATA drive when there are still lots of cheap IDE drives around? The USB connection is much slower than the drive anyway. It just didn't occur to me that IDE drives were still sold. I thought they were extinct!.

So now I have my backup drive, but I still need my SATA connector.

I learned two lessons.

The first lesson is that there are no quick purchases in tech. Unless it's something you have direct knowledge of, you can't duck the research chore.

The second lesson is that life with Macs has made me unsuited for the intricacies of PC hardware management. I just don't get the practice I used to get!

My apology to the political press

In July of 2007 I wrote this around a quote by Ambinder Digby ...

Gordon's Notes: John Edwards: Another man the media dislikes

It's increasingly clear that the US media dislikes John Edwards almost as much as they disliked Al Gore. Digby draws some conclusions ...

"...Ambinder says right out that "fairly or unfairly" the press can't stand John Edwards and so they are going to bury him. This is, of course, not unprecedented, since we saw what they did to Al Gore for the same reason... (And there is no question about whether it's fair. It most certainly isn't.)

Now, I am not especially surprised that the press corps doesn't like John Edwards. Many of these people probably didn't like guys like him in high school either and one thing we know about the political press corps is that they have never matured beyond the 11th grade.... I have to ask, once again, just who in the hell these people think they are and why they think they are allowed to pick our candidates for us based upon their own "feelings" about them? ...

Each time they've pulled this puerile nonsense in the last few years, it's resulted in a mess that's going to take even more years to unravel. And they learned nothing, apparently, since they are doing exactly the same thing in this election. If the press really wants to know why they are held in lower esteem than hitmen and health insurance claims adjusters, this is it..."

Krugman had a similar rant a while back. I don't think the '11th grade' is the full story; we need an insider to figure this one out. I do agree that the US media have about as much right as the GOP to be sanctimonious. Their star hangs low.

In Slate on Jan 29 Christopher Beam tells us the tricks of Edwards affair(s).

Dear Edwards-tracking press corp. You were right. Thank you for saving us. I'm sorry I was mean.

Know when to fold 'em. Calvin and Hobbes.

Very short, no personal revelations ...

Bill Watterson, creator of beloved 'Calvin and Hobbes' comic strip looks back ... cleveland.com

... It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did...

Makes one miss his voice all the more. Of course, never return to Calvin and Hobbes, but does he really have nothing to say that we would like to hear?

What would it take to get a public speech? Presidential Medal of Honor? The Nobel Prize in Literature?

It would be cruel to wish such fates upon him, so I won't.

He is, and will forever be, perhaps the greatest master of the short graphic story.

Apple and Amazon – Be nice to your science fiction writers

This Friday, when the traditional media was going to sleep, Amazon removed all Macmillan books from its online store. Not just eBooks, everything.

It was a bold move in a price-and-control technology-transition-type war with book publishers. Superficially, it looks like the kind of thing Apple did to the music labels. Corporate warfare – who cares?

Except there’s always collateral damage. In this case, including science fiction writers.

Who are, often, geeks. Geeks who write. Geeks who write well for money. Geeks with printing presses and readers.

By Friday night, the hellfire had begun …

• A Quick Note On eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx « Whatever
• Amazon, Macmillan- an outsider's guide to the fight - Charlie's Diary

It kept coming through the weekend. By Sunday Amazon surrendered unconditionally …

• Making Light- Amazon versus Macmillan
• It’s All About Timing « Whatever
• Amazon surrenders - Charlie's Diary
• All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend « Whatever
• Amazon-Macmillan- other perspectives - Charlie's Diary

I never even got to write the blog post I was mentally composing.

I wonder how long it took Amazon’s executive team to recognize they had to bail. Six hours?

They never even got to face the wrath of the mystery fans, much less the romance readership. For both of those readerships, however, the news and response would have had to go through ailing newspaper channels. The response cycle would have taken weeks, and Amazon’s ploy might have worked.

Science fiction writers have a far more connected, and more vicious, readership.

I trust Amazon and Apple have learned something. If they want to crush book publishers, they must first win over the science fiction writers. They are, however, a very suspicious and imaginative bunch …

PS. Amazon just killed the Kindle. Smart move guys.

Computers, viruses, intelligent design, natural selection, memes, mitochondria and, of course, the Fermi Paradox

Once upon a time it was every computer virus for itself. In those days there wasn’t much competition, and there wasn’t much of a business model.

Now there are business models for viruses, all based on variations of fraud and theft. Computers are important resources – they provide access to vulnerable wetware and replication facilities.

We know how this sort of thing works in the wet world. A dead host is a dead end. If a computer is so disabled that it become intolerably annoying, the wetware will turn it off. The optimal infection would make the computer more attractive, increasing the return on fraud and the replication rate.

So we would expect computer viruses to start fighting one another, each struggling to create the optimal infection. In time, some would start collaborating, creating de facto alliances. Synergies. Communities. Ecologies.

Except computer viruses don’t, yet, mostly, mutate and evolve in the traditional sense. They develop through vaguely-intelligent design. Still, this is the path they’re following. Modern computer infections include routines to disable rivals.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Well, it doesn’t exactly, but close enough. It’s such a cool meme, one can’t avoid replicating it.

In this instance, though, it’s cybology that recapitulates immunogenesis. We’ve long noted that the human immune system seemed to have quite a bit in common with the viruses and other infections it more or less opposes – when it’s not turning on us that is. Now we know that animals are, in large part, holobiontic ecologies of coopetiting viri.

Which makes it easier to understand how bacterial life ever developed in a sea of seething viri, and then became intracellular things like mitochondria and chloroplasts. Not only understandable, but perhaps inevitable. Inevitable that viruses should emergently collaborate to create bacteria, and thus cells and animals that should have minds and memes and computers and thus to other things too.

Which also explains the eerie silence.

Apple needs to do its own Flash block for Safari

Flash is bad enough on my i5, but it's death for our old G5. Per Daring Fireball's recommendation I tried installing ClickToFlash.

Yech. I ran into a number of bugs related to non-admin accounts. This is rough software, not nearly as polished as FlashBlock for Firefox.

If Apple wants to get serious in its war against the evil Adobe Flash, they need to give us Flash blocking built into Safari.

YouTube science videos - not exactly sterling

This YouTube Cell Biology video has a five star rating. It was uploaded in 2007.

Uploaded in 2007, first recorded in 1981. It's not a biology video, it's a history of science video.

This isn't atypical.

I'd ask Google to give us a scholar.google.com for YouTube videos, but I'm beginning to suspect there are only about 20 really good science videos on all of YouTube (like this one - link is to a family blog I'm experimenting with). That doesn't make for much of a search engine.

I'm shocked, shocked, to find that business model problems are going on here!

Dear Adobe: Please die and take Flash with you

Mac users don't like Flash. We have good reason. For example:

Adobe's typical response is that only a small percentage of web users have Macs or iPhones, and their market share is so great that resistance is futile.

Maybe Adobe is right, but Adobe resistance is not just an Apple thing. Google doesn't like Flash, neither does Mozilla, and Microsoft has Silverlight.

Of course, excepting Mozilla, none of these companies are angelic. I'd be friendlier to Adobe, except it's not just Flash that's crappy on the Mac. With the sole exception of Lightroom, (started on OS X) Adobe uses proprietary App installers that are absolute garbage (their updater platform on Windows is hardly better). Adobe has been blowing off customers for a very long time.

Go away Adobe. Go away Flash.