Rajini Vaidyanathan, Gordon Brown and me - strange loops in 2010

I'm killing time at DC's Union Station, waiting for my train to BWI and home, when I'm accosted by a young woman with a note pad. She tells me she's from the BBC, and she wants to know what I think of an engagement.

Even I couldn't escape that news. I knew someone named Kate was marrying an English aristocrat. I had nowhere to go that minute, and she seemed to be in pain, so I tried to come up with something quotable. She told me to look to the BBC site ...

BBC News - Rajini Vaidyanathan - Royal wedding: American reaction to the Prince's engagement

... But even those who won't be across every dress, table arrangement and invite, are celebrating the news.

"It's fun," says John Faughnan of Minnesota. "It beats reading about the great recession."

Mr Faughnan said he had only learned Kate Middleton's name this morning, and the future Queen's profile here in the US is still relatively low.,,,

My Manchester born mother was thrilled, and it was a funny enough story to share on Facebook. Then it got more interesting.

On Facebook a friend pointed out that Rajini Vaidyanathan is a bit of a comer, as can be seen in her YouTube interview with Gordon Brown. She's not always stuck with boring reaction interviews on a painfully boring topic.

The lady has a trajectory, and I met her near the start.

A strange loop.

Michelle Bachman and Jesse Ventura: Fruitcakes are not the worst

Minnesota has an undeserved reputation as a sober sort of place. So it surprises some to learn that the Tea Party's Michele Bachman hails from a GOP safe seat in the burbs of the Twins.

The truth is, Minnesota is a cross between California and Oregon. I love it here, but we made the wrestler and talk show host Jesse Ventura Governor in 1999. Ventura only served one term; after four years everyone, including Jesse, was happy to see him go. Minnesota then elected Tim Pawlenty Governor. Pawlenty is now running for President.

Bachman is 100% fruitcake, but Ventura isn't far behind. Pawlenty, on the other hand, is not a fruitcake. Pawlenty is a devout Marketarian, a banal servant of money and power.

Bachman is a lousy Representative. Ventura was a lousy governor. Even at his worst though, Ventura did less harm to Minnesota than Tim Pawlenty.

Bachman is a wart on the face of American democracy, but she's not a cancer. There are worse things than fruitcakes in government.

See also: Why you should vote for the Tea Party’s coven in the century of the fruitbat.

The phone call is dead - sort of

Phil Bradley comments on a Tech Crunch essay on the death of the phone call.

That seems strange to me, since I spend a lot of time on the phone. Reading more closely though, neither is claiming that remote voice communication is dead. What they're trying to say, but can't quite get it, is that the unscheduled phone call is dead. (Voice mail is beyond dead.)

I agree, and Thank Darwin it's gone.

The unschedule phone call was rude. It was almost as rude as having a neighbor walk into your bedroom unannounced. Does anyone of a certain age remember enjoying the sound of a ringing phone (ok, teenage passions excepted)?

We only tolerated it because there were no alternatives.

Now, when we need to talk, we schedule it. My mother knows I phone her daily at a certain time [1]. When Emily and I need to do an impromptu conversation  we usually text first to setup the call. At work all my phone calls and conferences are scheduled, even if only by email or IM.

The unscheduled phone call is going away, and the world is a better place without it.

[1] Via Google voice to Montreal. GV has saved me about $4,000 in phone bills over the past 2-3 years.

Argentina of the North? We should be so lucky.

Like Nicholas Kristoff, I’ve used Argentina as a metaphor for the twilight of America. I thought of it as an example of a rich nation that quietly fell apart even as its income disparity grew.

I’ve called American "Argentina of the North”.

Now, like Kristof, I am apologizing to Argentina …

A Hedge Fund Republic- - Nicholas Kristof - NYTimes.com

… The best data series I could find is for Argentina. In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.

Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007…

Another metaphor bites the dust. Sorry Argentina, but at least we can aspire to learn from your experience.

Torture and the constitution: The fury beings with the Ghailini trial

Now we get to the discussion we’ve long expected.

Civilian courts do not allow testimony obtained through torture. The GOP is the party of torture, so they are enraged.

Incidentally, this NYT article has one of the most misleading and lousy headlines of the past few months atop an article that buries everything that matters.

What is being tested here is not Obama’s strategy, but rather America’s care of its Constitution (emphases mine). America will fail …

Terror Verdict Tests Obama’s Strategy on Trials - NYTimes.com

… Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.

… the reason some Guantánamo cases are hard to prosecute is that under the Bush administration, evidence was obtained by coercion, creating a problem for prosecutors regardless of the legal venue…

… many observers attributed any weakness to the prosecution’s case to the fact that the Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness apparently because investigators discovered the man’s existence after interrogators used abusive and coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani…

… But the question of where Mr. Mohammed will be prosecuted has remained in limbo, and Mr. Holder has made no more referrals from the detainee population to either system.

While Judge Kaplan could still sentence Mr. Ghailani to a life sentence, even some proponents of civilian trials acknowledged that his acquittal on most of the charges against him was damaging to their cause because it was a stark demonstration that it was possible that a jury might acquit a defendant entirely in such a case…

“The paradox with these kinds of cases has always been that if these individuals are found not-guilty, will the American government let them go free, which is the construct of a criminal proceeding? And the answer is no. That is the reality. This case highlights that tension, and will complicate the political debate about how to handle more senior Al Qaeda figures, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed cannot be convicted in a constitutionally valid trial because he was abundantly tortured. That was one of the GOP’s gifts to America.

The GOP has been, and will be, the party of torture. That is the source of their rage; they love their vision of the Constitution, but they hate the reality of the Constitution.

Apple-Google armistice day - Google Voice for the iPhone is available.

Google Voice for iPhone is available, the first Apple Google war is over. It lasted from about July 27, 2009 to Nov 9, 2010.

I speculated on why it was ending in September when the ceasefire was official. I listed nine items. If I had to pick one cause it would be Facebook shafting Apple at the Ping launch.

Detroit, dialysis and special needs

Charlie LeDuff has written an essay on the state of the worst bits of Detroit. If you're feeling sturdy, you can follow it with a Robin Fields review of the state of America's universal care system for dialysis provision.

Have you read them both? No, Scotch is not a good solution.

Both essays made my skepti-sense tingle. It feels like we're missing some context, that we're probably getting a simplified view. The dialysis experience described here, for example, is not what the insured middle class gets. Even so, I think there's fundamental truth in both stories.

The dialysis problem feels most "easily" fixable. Health Care Reform, once it survives Limbaugh and Palin, can absorb this isolated program. Yes, it will survive. Mega corporations are now pivoting to life in a post-HCR world. They control Limbaugh, he will do their will.

Detroit is harder. Everyone who can leave has left. The remainder are the disabled and the children of the disabled, enmeshed in a nest of poverty. To a first approximation, it's a densely concentrated adult special needs community, with a high concentration of special needs in children as well. (I know a special needs community well. You would be wrong to read this as a condemnation.)

I think there are fixes for Detroit. We need to look for lessons from New Orleans pre and post Katrina, lessons from the most impoverished aboriginal communities, and lessons from war ravaged cities like 1980s Lebanon and 2010 Baghdad, lessons from 1970s Harlem. Detroit can be improved, but it will take decades ...

Slow hard work. There is no lack of challenge in the world.

Instapaper makes you more productive ...

This can help get to Inbox zero ...

Gordon's Tech: Instapaper: editor's picks and more

... You know you do it. Sitting in a boring phone meeting... Browsing web sites on your corporate box (or iPhone* or iPad). All's fine until you see something you really want to read. That's crossing the line though. I can't read something good and pay attention to a dull meeting. Worse, I might continue when the meeting is done -- when I should be doing real work. (I assume everything I do on a corporate machine is monitored of course.)

Instapaper solves the problem. I click the Read Later bookmarklet and put the browser down. I'll read the article, elegantly formatted, on my iPhone later. If you don't have an iPhone, you can read it with any web client through your free Instapaper account...

The most vile societies in human history...

Adam Goodheart is blogging the Civil War ...

A Senator Secedes – Reluctantly - NYTimes.com

... The imperious, aristocratic senator was no bleeding heart, to say the least. Master of more than 300 slaves, he did not hesitate to flog them when they transgressed, wielding the whip with his own hand. Nor did he hesitate to take sexual advantage of the women under his power, fathering several children with them. (In one instance, he did so with a household servant, and then with her teenage daughter.) In politics, he had popularized the phrase ‘cotton is king,’ and gave a notorious speech in 1858 arguing that every society, even a republic, needed an inferior ‘mud-sill’ class to ‘do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life...

White South Carolina was "wild for secession" after the election of Lincoln. However we may see the early Lincoln now, white Southerners believed he would end the slavery they seemed to love.

How much, I wonder, was their passion driven by shame and guilt? The greatest anger I see comes from men and women (and children!) accused of crimes they deny to themselves. Crimes they deny to themselves, even as they know they are guilty.

The white southern United States of 1860 was a vile society, among the most vile of the past three hundred years.

Which others belong in that hall of shame?

Nazi Germany, of course. But who else? The obvious other examples, such as Pol Pot's Cambodia, Mao's China, and Stalin's Russia were all essentially medieval tyrannies in modern times. They were as much evil regimes as evil societies.

Are the only contenders 1930s Germany and 1860s American South?

America the senescent

I think, more than all of the economic and demographic indicators, this tells us that America's time as a great nation is over ...

The baby steps that have taken the United States from decrying torture to celebrating it.  - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

... In an America in which the former president can boast on television that he approved the water-boarding of U.S. prisoners, it can hardly be a shock that following a lengthy investigation, no criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.* We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man...

Move over France, we need a spot on that bench.

Voice menu systems don't understand you? Try my fix

Cheap commercial voice "recognition" systems, like the one used by my employer's outsourced HR services, don't recognize my voice. Google has no problems, but when I say "benefits" they hear "please, torment me".

At home I can ask Emily to speak for me, but she's not always available. I need a substitute voice that's always available.

Fortunately I carry one.

The next time I face the cheap VR demon, I'm going to have my iPhone's VoiceOver voice talk for me.

Here's how it works. In settings go to General:Accessibility and set triple click to turn VoiceOver on/off.

In VoiceOver set Typing Feedback to "nothing". Set Pitch Change to OFF and speed to slow.

If VoiceOver is oddly silent, by the way, check this fix.

Now I'm ready. The next time I have to talk to a low end machine, I'll type the words and numbers into my iPhone. Then I'll use VoiceOver and let the phone do the talking for me. I bet it gets a lot more respect than I get.

Edging to AI: Constructive (almost) comment spam

It took me a day to realize that this comment on Gordon's Notes: Apologetics: God and the Fermi Paradox was a spam comment (Spomment):

Luke said... Interesting questions you ask - as always enjoy reading your posts. We all have our personal experiences & beliefs, but I do have to challenge you to check out an event coming up in the spring that I recently was introduced to. March 12, 2011 a simulcast called The Case for Christianity is taking place that will address the very question you have asked. Led by Lee Strobel (former Legal Editor of the Chicago Tribune) & Mark Mittelberg, all of the most avoided questions Christians don't like to answer or even discuss. Both are authors of extremely intriguing books, I encourage you to check them out as well as the simulcast in March. Definitely worth the time & worthy of the debate! Thanks again!

It's obvious in retrospect "interesting questions you ask" is a give away. It doesn't address any specific aspect of my post, and it leads directly into an event promotion.

Still, it snuck under my radar -- and Google's too. It's well constructed.

Of course the construction was human, only the targeting was algorithmic. It's a bit of a milestone though -- it's almost a relevant comment.

Charles Stross and others have speculated that spambot wars will spawn hard AI. First, though, they have to become specific, relevant, and constructive. We're getting closer ...

Incidentally, shame on Strobel and Mittelberg for using this kind of sleazoid marketing.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Slouching towards Skynet (2007)
• Gordon's Notes: The evolution of comment spam - from parasite to symbiote? (2009)
• Gordon's Notes: Phishing with the post-Turing avatar (2010)
• xkcd: Suspicion: Spambot love
• xkcd: Constructive (2010 - when spambots rule)

My Google Reader bundles - November 2011

Google Reader lets us create bundles of our favorite feeds to share.

Here are some of mine as of Nov 11. Click on each link and there's an option to subscribe to some or all of the bundled feeds:

• Science Picks
• Science and Technology
• Politics and Economics

My shared item page has everything.

Nordic skiing: how to tow a kid

In a previous life I had one of the earliest english language web pages on skijoring (nordic skiing with your dog). In today's life Kateva prefers running to pulling, and sometimes my kids need a bit of a boost miles from the trailhead.

So now I'm the dog. Call it Skidadding - nordic skiing with your Dad.

I don't need a pulk, I want the kids to stay on their skis. I need a lead and I need a skijoring harness they can wear. That leaves my harness to develop.

I thought of anchoring to my shoulders, but they move too much and that places too much strain on my back. A friend's friend is co-leader of Minnesota's Wilderness Classroom, she suggested adapting a pulk harness.

Ready made pulk harnesses are hard to find in the US, but another Minnesotan, Ed Bouffard, has a web site on building your own ski pulk or mountaineering sled or gear sled. He sells parts for pulks, and provides a free PDF on pulk construction.

Mr. Bouffard advises building a harness using either a Camp Trails replacement backpack belt (alas, I don't think these are sold any more!) or a heavy duty lumbar (fanny) pack with built in shoulder straps. A canvas repair shop can sew on loops made of 3/4" nylon webbing. Carabiners can then be attached just behind the lateral hips loops.

I can then use a nylon loop from the binners to a skijoring lead attached a skijoring harness on a child.

Seems simple enough -- a fun project for the fall. I'll update this post with what I end up doing.

Update 11/8/10: Some products I probably won't buy due to cost, I think I can make something sufficient for my needs.

• Skijor Now belt for Skijoring or "Canicross": $130
• Ultrapaws Skijor hip belt: $70 (I like this one).

Canicross is cross country running with a dog ... "Fast for a human is five minute miles over a marathon distance. That is 12 miles per hour. Dogs on the other hand can run 12 miles per hour all day long. Sled dogs at the world championship often run 20 miles per hour for over twenty miles...? (Only true in cold weather by the way. Humans rule in hot weather.)

Rollerjoring is what you'd imagine.

Honestly, dogs made a smart bargain 30,000 years ago.

Apologetics: God and the Fermi Paradox

As a Catholic schoolboy in 1930s Quebec my father practiced a form of polemics known as Apologetics [1]. He argued through reason for the the existence of God.

Dad tells me he was good at Apologetics. As best I can tell he's an atheist, which probably helped his rhetoric.

I think I share the same gift. So I've long been surprised that theists don't use the Fermi paradox in their arguments. I suggested they pursue this back in 2003 ...

SETI, the Fermi Paradox and The Singularity: Why our search for extraterrestial intelligence has failed

... The universe we live in was designed so that we would be alone. There are a few variants on this idea, but they're fundamentally very similar. I list three here. In some ways the Fermi Paradox may be an even stronger "existence of God" argument that the usual "balance of physical parameters" argument.

1. Some non-omnipotent entity created our universe (there are allegedly serious physicists who speculate about how one might create a universe) and deliberately tweaked certain parameters so that sentience would occur on average about once per galaxy. Maybe they lived in a crowded galaxy and thought an alternative would be interesting.
2. God created the world in 7 days, and He made it for man's Dominion. He didn't want anyone else in our galaxy, maybe in the entire universe.
3. Nick Bostrom makes a credible argument^[9] that there's a reasonable likelihood that we exist in a simulation. If so, then perhaps the existence of an non-human civilizations does not suit the purposes of the simulation. (This could be considered a special case of "God created the world...")

Today, for the first time, a Google news search filter of mine found a Kevin Roeten post making an Apologetic argument ...

Atheists Beware--A Bona Fide Reason for God

... Assuming 10 billion years for the age of the Milky Way galaxy, there was at least 2000 chances for all additional civilizations (#16, p.48, Show Me God) to settle the entire galaxy. Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asks, "Where are they?" Hence, Fermi's Paradox...

...  For civilizations 15 light years away, they should be receiving signals from TV shows transmitted by earth, such as "I Love Lucy". Their signal to earth should be arriving back about now. We've received nothing...

I doubt this is really the first time anyone but me has made a connection between the Fermi Paradox and apologetics, but it's the first one my filters have caught. Congratulations Kevin.

This is why, though I'm functionally an atheist, I'm technically agnostic [2]. Personally I assign a non-zero probability that we're living in a simulation, which is just about the same as saying there somewhen existed one or more all powerful creators. Of course this says nothing about their attitudes towards us. Given the nature of reality I rather hope we're unnoticed mice in the walls, but I fear they're sadists.

Of course I assign a higher probability to the Fermi paradox answer that a "great filter" eliminates all biological civilizations. Still, I'm glad to see theists picking up on an interesting argument.

[1] The word "apologetics" is all but forgotten. It deserves a resurrection.

[2] It's impossible to truly disprove the existence of the supernatural, at best we can only prove it's not necessary to model what we measure. So, really, there are no rational atheists, there are only functional atheists. Incidentally, I'm very sympathetic to the religious inclination. Reality is overrated.