Mimicry - more than we imagined

The more we look around, the more mimicry we see ...

Basics - Surviving by Disguising - Nature’s Game of Charades - Natlie Angier - NYTimes.com

...  scientists recently discovered that in some ant species, the queen is a consummate percussionist, equipped with a tiny, uniquely ridged organ for stridulating out royal fanfares that help keep her workers in line. Who knew that the queen was such a squeezebox? Her freeloaders sure did. The scientists also discovered parasitic butterfly larvae in the colony that use their abdominal muscles or other body parts to precisely imitate the queen's stridulations, an act of musical piracy that induces worker ants to flutter and fuss and regurgitate food right into the parasites' mouths...

Dogs mimic humans to communicate with them. I mimic my dog to play with her. Humans mimic one another to facilitate communication, each participant in a conversation adapts to find a common ground. A way for very diverse minds to get along.

The disposable brain - lessons from our elastic axons

The human brain is misplaced. It ought to be inside our pelvic-abdominal cavity, where humans carry babies. Instead it's stuck at the top of a tall biped, fully exposed to all traumas.

Intelligent design, my ass.

Thanks to its bad neighborhood the poor brain is being constantly banged about. Every so often it gets plastered against its membranous sac, typically when a head meets an rapidly moving object such as a sidewalk or a baseball bat. This is not good for something with "the consistency of custard". Evolution has struggled to adjust (emphases mine) ...

The Brain: What Happens to a Linebacker's Neurons? | Carl Zimmer | DISCOVER

... axons are remarkably elastic. They can stretch out slowly to twice their ordinary length and then pull back again without any harm. Axons are stretchy due in part to their flexible internal skeleton. ... When an axon stretches, these microtubules can slide past one another. If the movement is gradual, the microtubules will immediately slide back into place after the stretching stops, with no harm done.

If Smith delivers a quick, sharp puff of air, however, something else entirely happens. Instead of recoiling smoothly, the axon develops kinks. Over the next 40 minutes, the axon gradually returns to its regular shape, but after an hour a series of swellings appears. Each swelling may be up to 50 times as wide as the normal diameter of the axon. Eventually the axon falls apart.

These kinks form, Smith believes, when microtubules are stretched so rapidly that they snap ... Normally, enzymes inside neurons are constantly taking apart microtubules and building new ones with the recycled parts. But now the enzymes attack the broken ends of the microtubules, causing the internal structure of the axon to dissolve...

... Smith’s findings could shed light on a common but puzzling brain trauma known as diffuse axonal injury. This happens when people experience sudden accelerations to the brain—from a bomb’s shock waves, for example, or from whiplash in a car crash ... When pathologists perform autopsies on people with diffuse axonal injury, they see severed axons with swollen tips, just like what Smith sees in his experiments.

Smith’s research also suggests that even mild shocks to the brain can cause serious harm. ... A moderate stretch to an axon, Smith recently found, causes the sodium channels to malfunction. In order to keep the current flowing, the traumatized axons start to build more channels.

Smith suspects that such a mended axon may be able to go on working, but only in a very frail state. Another stretch—even a moderate one—can cause the axon to go haywire ... The axon dies like a shorted-out circuit.

... Preliminary brain studies show that axons are still vulnerable even months after an initial stretch...

Just in case you're not depressed enough yet, wherever you read "axons" substitute the phrase "young axons". Any wagers on how well older axons stretch? Also note that "even months after" doesn't mean they're not vulnerable "years after".

It's interesting, after reading this article, to search PubMed with the phrase "microtubule amyloid axonal injury".  A 2006 paper looked at animal model transient accumulation of neurotoxic amyloid precursor protein after injury. Amyloid protein has, of course, long been associated with Alzheimer's dementia. Head injury is also strongly associated with dementia risk; head injury avoidance is about the only "intervention" known to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease. (Don't make too much of this injury/amyloid connection though, researchers have been banging on it since the 1990s. It's not straightforward.)

Short of radical genetic engineering, or spending our lives watching TV with thickly padded carpets, what can we do about our fragile brains? Sure, football is dead. Yes, soccer will lose the header. Sure we can change the rules of hockey. Yes, horseback riding is almost as crazy as riding donorcycles. But, really, have you watched any TV lately? There are worse things than dementia.

Today's helmets are not the answer. Current bicycle helmet designs, for example, don't materially change the rate of anterior impact deceleration. Their primary benefit is to facilitating head gliding and reduce abrasions; they aren't designed to reduce the deceleration injuries that matter -- without severing our wimpy cervical spines. (On road bikes effectiveness is further diminished by paradoxical automobile driver behavior.)

We need to revise our sports (so long NFL), but we also need much better helmets. Air bags anyone?

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Helmets: good for inline, not so good for bicycling?
• Helmet: building a better bicycle/inline helmet - Ideas? - rec.bicycles.misc | Google Groups (2002)

How to use Amazon reviews

I wrote a negative Amazon review of Apple's battery charger (2/6 batteries were defective). As expected "0 of 2 people found the following review helpful".

This is very common with certain items, such as Apple products, Microsoft products, Christian conservative books, and other products that have "fans". It also happens with lawn mowers and dehumidifiers [1], but in those cases the negative feedback comes from manufacturer employees and retailers.

The "helpful" metric on Amazon reviews is not only worthless, it's harmful. It points people away from important reviews. It's also used to create reviewer rankings, so those are also worse than worthless. (By using these metrics Amazon is setting itself up for emergent fraud.)

There's another weakness of Amazon reviews -- name changes. Just as Google's Ballmer Schmidt tells teens they'll need to rename themselves as adults, so to do vendors change model numbers to dodge bad reputations.

There are workarounds for both problems. Here's how to use Amazon reviews:

• Always read the negative reviews, even on a 4.5 star product. The two star reviews are usually the best, some of the 1 star reviews are nonsensical.
• Remember statistics, a 50 review product will usually have meaningful negative reviews.
• Look at other models by the vendor to defeat name change strategies. Amazon keeps older model information around for a while, so you can usually find the previous model number. Vendors don't change their behaviors as quickly as they change their model numbers.
• When looking across a product category, sort the category by sales, not by average rating. The rating averages are not discriminating and are unreliable.
• Give more weight to True Name (authenticated) reviewers. If a review seems unusual, look at other reviews by the same person.

- footnotes

[1] Based on my experiences with appliance purchases over the past few years, I think Sears or even Best Buy are better options than Amazon -- because it is practical to use the warranty.

Why not Depo-Provera dart wild horse mares?

Horses are tougher than they look. Millions used to live in awful conditions before the internal combustion engine filled the world's glue factories. Now, in the absence of wolves and mountain lions they're overflowing their bounded western world and the private lands that stockpile the overflow.

Modern Americans are more sentimental than they were 100 years ago, so we're unwilling to shoot them all. Were I a horse I'd rather be shot than starve or be eaten alive by wolves, but nobody asks the horses.

So why can't we hire cowboys to shoot mares with Depo-Provera in late May? It's cheap stuff, its used with horses, and it's designed for deposition. Shoot a capsule of it into the mare buttocks around mating time.

It's been done for lions.

After the Google Hack: Life in the transparent society

My Google Account (Gmail and more) was hacked on 9/3/10, a day before I wrote about the risks of online backup.

I had a 99th percentile password. It had six letters, four numbers, no words or meaningful sequences. It wouldn't be in a dictionary. On the other hand, like Schneier and other security gurus, I didn't change it often. I also had it stored locally on multiple desktop and iPhone apps. As far as I know it wasn't stored on any reasonably current web app.

If my password had been a bike lock, it would have been one of those high end models. Enough to secure a mid-range bike on the principle that better bikes with cheaper locks were easy to find.

That wasn't enough. For some reason a pro thief [2] decided to pinch my mid-range bike. They didn't do any damage, they didn't seem to send spam [1]. They seem to have unlocked my bike, peaked around, and locked it again.

Why would a pro bother? Trust me, I lead an intensely narrowcast life. It's interesting to only a few people, and boring to everyone else.

On the other hand, it wasn't always so. "I coulda been a contendah." I knew people who have had interesting lives, I still correspond with some. If a pro was interested in me, it was most likely because of someone like that. My visitor was probably looking for correspondence. Once they found it, or confirmed my dullness, they wouldn't have further interest in me.

Fortunately even that correspondence is quite dull.

I've changed my password. The new one is 99.9th percentile. Doesn't matter, I doubt I'm much more secure.

This isn't a complete surprise. Passwords died as a high end security measure about ten years ago. What's more surprising, except in retrospect, is that you don't have to really do anything or be anybody to get some high end attention. You only have to be within 1-2 degrees of separation of someone interesting. Security and "interest" are "social"; even a dull person like me can inherit the security risk of an interesting acquaintance or correspondent.

Welcome to the transparent society. If you put something in the Cloud, you should assume it's public. Draw your own conclusions about the corporate Cloud business model and online backup, and remember your Gmail is public.

footnotes --

[1] Of course they could erase the sent email queue, but I haven't gotten any bounce backs. Anyway, there are much easier ways to send spam.
[2] Russian pro, Chinese government equivalent, etc. Why pro? Because the hacker didn't change my password after they hacked the account, they didn't trash anything obvious, they didn't send out spam, and the access was by an abandoned domain. I'm not vulnerable to keystroke logger hacks except at my place of employment and wifi intercepts are relatively infrequent. Still, it's all probabilities.

Was my Google account hacked?

Ominous warning this afternoon of a possible Google account hack ...

Gordon's Tech: Scary events in Google password land...

... I was told my account had been accessed from an atypical location 1 day ago. The next thing I saw was that it was accessed from ductus.com (WA)...

... The best answer is that this is a false alarm. That's bad enough.

The less best option is that either my Google password has leaked or Google has a global security issue. A dictionary attack would be unlikely to work on my prior password. The tucows domain would then have been a hacked attack vector....

I'm looking for other reports like mine.

Update 10/13/10: Yes, it was.

Lessons in history: iTunes U and the quiet revolution in university education

Amidst all the noise and turbulence of humanity, what will become historic? Some things are obvious. If there are history books in 100 years, they will include a paragraph about 9/11.

Other historic events slide in slowly, and are little noted. I think the transformation of university and even secondary education is like that. Consider a two recent little noted stories (emphases mine) ...

iTunes U Downloads Top 300 Million (Apple press release)

... In just over three years, iTunes® U downloads have topped 300 million and it has become one of the world’s most popular online educational catalogs. Over 800 universities throughout the world have active iTunes U sites, and nearly half of these institutions distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store®. New content has just been added from universities in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico and Singapore, and iTunes users now have access to over 350,000 audio and video files from educational institutions around the globe....

and then there's Sal Kahn (quote excludes stupid parts of this Fortune article [1])

... Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere ... Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day -- nearly double the student body at Harvard and Stanford combined. Since he began his tutorials in late 2006, Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide ... Most page views come from the U.S., followed by Canada, England, Australia, and India. In any given month, Khan says, he's reached about 200,000 students....

Kahn, contrary to the silly Fortune article, isn't in the same league as iTunes U, but he's part of a the same quiet revolution as the UK's university lecture podcasts, OpenAccess Journals, MIT's Open U, and, yes, wikipedia. It's a revolution presaged by the vast lecture hall I visited in Bangkok in 1981, by the early morning TV lectures of decades past, and by the BBC's long history of radio education.

The transformation of higher education has been underway for ten years out of sight of the rich world. It is going to come to places like France's infamous Nanterre University, and it will come to America after the college bubble bursts.

Sometimes change that moves slowly can be powerful.

Team Obama naivete - I am more than surprised

Honestly, I'm stunned. I never thought Team Obama was naive or stupid. They were, I assumed, smart professionals. Any talk about GOP enlightenment and cooperation was just a smokescreen for public consumption. Rahm Emanual was a knife fighter, not a fool.

I assumed that, until I read Krugman today (emphases mine) ...

Rahmism - Krugman - NYTimes.com

... Look: early on the administration had a political theory: it would win bipartisan legislative victories, and each success would make Republicans who voted no feel left out, so that they would vote for the next initiative, and so on. (By the way, read that article and weep: “The massive resistance Republicans posed to Clinton in 1993 is impossible to imagine today.” They really believed that.)...

Tell me it isn't so. Tell me they weren't so deluded about the Party of Torture. Tell me they weren't so deluded about the fragile, one foot over the cliff-edge, home of Beck and Limbaugh, American nation.

Give me evidence too, because this looks very bad.

I thought they were smarter than that.

What the world needs: a divided thickness blanket

Forget "sleep numbers". At a certain age and level of entropy, the marital challenge is not mattress firmness, it's temperature. A particular gender is intermittently far too hot, another is shivering.

The answer, of course, is a variable thickness blanket. One half designed for insulation and warmth, the other a wicking material that provides cool comfort.

Do you hear me China? Start making this thing!

The Cray 1A resurrected

For people of a certain age, Cray was the ultimate mind blowing supercomputer. Several of my colleagues worked for the company.

So how fast was the original Cray 1A, the monster machine purchased by top secret agencies to build bombs and do spy stuff?

Homebrew Cray-1A | ChrisFenton.com

... Now, let’s get down to specs - What is this bad boy running? The original machine ran at a blistering 80 MHz, and could use from 256-4096 kilowords (32 megabytes!) of memory. It has 12 independent, fully-pipelined execution units, and with the help of clever programming, can peak at 3 floating-point operations per cycle. Here’s a diagram of the overall architecture...

My iPhone 4 is ten times faster.

We really don't understand our world.

As you might guess from the phrase "What is this bad boy running?" Chris Fenton is an absolute, stark raving mad, uber-geek. He has built a Cray-1A equivalent at 1/10 scale. The only thing he's missing is the software. Maybe some of my friends have some at home.

Read the story ....

Cable connections - now think about conflict

Fallows blogs (again) about the infowarrior global telecom map, which includes cables like C2C (emphases mine):

Greg's Cable Map: C2C

7.5Tbps

16 Cable Landings  

Changi (Singapore)
Nasugbu (Philippines)
Chung Hom Kok (Hong Kong)
Tanguisson (Guam)
Chikura (Japan)
Redondo Beach (USA)
Hawaii (USA)
Los Angeles (USA)
Hillsboro (USA)
Nedonna Beach (USA)
Toyohashi (Japan)
Shima (Japan)
Pusan (South Korea)
Nanhui District (China)
Tamusi (Taiwan)
Fangshan (Taiwan)

War would be very inconvenient in the modern world. James F sends us to Stephenson's classic Wired article on this topic, I learned some of that history from Stephenson's later Cryptonomicon.

Pawlenty - an opportunist to despise

Tim Pawlenty is governor of Minnesota, with about four months left to serve. He's not running for reelection. He's supposedly running for the 2012 Presidential election.

Given his time remaining, this announcement will probably have limited impact. It's a good reminder, however, of what a sleazebag he is ...

Pawlenty restricts health money | StarTribune.com

In a move that could cost the state $1 billion or more in federal health care funds, Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced an executive order Tuesday designed to keep what he terms "Obamacare" out of Minnesota.

Pawlenty said he will require all state agencies to funnel their federal grant requests through his office in order to "stop Minnesota's participation in projects that are laying the groundwork for a federally controlled health care system" -- unless they are required by law or approved by his office...

... Pawlenty could be closing the door, at least during the remaining months of his term, to more than 100 federal health care grants that would fund projects ranging from diabetes prevention to postpartum care for new mothers to tighter regulation of insurance companies...

Think of Pawlenty as a brighter and more cynical version of Michelle Bachman.

Cross-Country Skiing in MSP - Adelsman

The web is a lot like LA. It has no history.

Almost no history. By web standards Adelsman's XC ski pages are ancient civilization. I linked to them in my 1995 skijoring page (long neglected) but they're still around, and better than ever.

I found them again when I wondered where a marvelous paper listing of Twin Cities trails had come from. Google showed me it was a reformatting of Adelsman's metro ski page.

They do take advertising, but, as marvelous as this site is covering Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, I doubt they get rich from it. It must be a labor of love.

Our MN state fair visit is past, the days are getting shorter, and now we pray for a rerun of the excellent XC ski season of winter 2010. We'll be using this site, including the lodging section (hint to advertisers :-).

PS. Naturally skinny skiers are big on tradition, but a feed would not be amiss...

Gmail's personalized classifier: your own private AI

When you read about Gmail's new "Priority Inbox" feature, it helps to know that "Classifiers" are at the heart of what we used to call "AI" ...

Gmail Priority Inbox: 

....Google has to build a personalized classifier for each Gmail user and it needs a lot of messages. 'Email importance ranking works best for people who receive a lot of email,' explains Google. Google takes into account implicit signals like: the messages from people you frequently email are important, if a message includes words frequently used in other messages you usually read then it's probably important, the messages you star are probably more important than the messages you archive without opening. There are also explicit signals: click on the important/unimportant buttons, create filters to mark messages as important."...

Classifiers are used in speech recognition, Google Search and so on -- they're not new. For that matter, this kind of "what's important" ranking has been done many times without using formal classifiers.

Still, this is a mini-milestone of sorts. Classic AI technology is moving to our personal lives from multiple directions. The next step is deploying these classifiers into Google's Facebook-alternative, and then it's another step to our pending lifestream classifiers (which might help keep memory-impaired boomers functional longer).

Yes, those are Skynet's footsteps you hear ... :-).

Yes, this is part of why the IT driver of our whitewater world is not going away, but only getting bigger.

Michael Lewis - The Big Short - how we lost our economy

Tim Bray has written a review of Michael Lewis book "The Big Short". Tim loves Lewis book.

Do read Bray's review and lessons learned. Lesson 1: People in the Finance industry are in the business of making money for themselves. Obvious, but easily forgotten.

Bray gives us some links to read. Here they are, followed by some of mine:

Tim's links:

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (9780393072235): Michael Lewis (480 reviews, 4 stars)
• The End Of Wall Streets Boom - Michael Lewis - Portfolio.com (I remember reading this Nov 2008 essay at the time)
• Triple A Failure - Roger Lowenstein - New York Times Magazine - 2008. I hate the credit rating agencies too. So should you.

Old posts of mine:

• Lewis and Einhorn - repairing the financial world (Jan 2009, f/u to Lewis Portfolio essay)
• Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street. My God. My reaction to the Portfolio.com essay.
• The Fall of Citigroup means we don’t understand what’s happening …

It all feels like ancient history, but it was only two years ago, it's not fixed (especially the rating agencies from hell), and most of us are still unsure we really understand what hit us.

Of course I think it was fundamentally computers and China. Robotics, AI and Peak Oil lie ahead, so get used to the whitewater.