Contrary Brin

Re-allocating energy research... a lesson in capitalism

2009-11-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

The Obama Administration, while pumping up funding and incentives to further develop hybrid vehicles, has slashed $100 million (60%) from the budget for George W. Bush’s preferred approach -- hydrogen fueled cars. Of course, this is one more sign that we are being led by people who want America to succeed, and no longer by technological morons, determined to make every possible wrong decision.

Why am I so fierce in my appraisal of so-called “hydrogen-power” -- despite my portraying it positively, in several stories and novels? Because it cannot possibly help us in the near (twenty year) future, as was cogently pointed out recently by Energy Secretary ( and Nobel winner) Stephen Chu. Even were all the bugs to be solved and taken out of the fuel cells under discussion, the lack of anything resembling a system to distribute hydrogen fuel to the masses would relegate this technology to the realm of science fiction for at least several decades.

Meanwhile, it would be business as usual, as the US plunges ever deeper into hock to Big Oil and hostile foreign producers. Of course, anyone vested with a scintilla of imagination might wonder if this was the intent of the entire H-Power endeavor all along, to suck up public energy research funds and fritter them away uselessly, without ever actually affecting national self-sufficiency. Moreover, ask yourself this: even once all the problems with distribution were finally ironed out, and hydrogen-ready service stations were finally standing by, who would handle the new fuel’s distribution and commercial sale?

You got it. The same guys who were actually getting all the research money, under Bush. The oilcos. All of them Bushite pals.

In contrast, plug-in hybrids have the potential to draw much of their power off the electric grid... and potentially - eventually - solar rooftops, leading to true (if partial) autonomy. Above all, they would result in a dispersed power and supply system, not dependent upon the oilcos and more conducive to participation by small, startup companies. In other words, real capitalism instead of reflexive monopolism.

That latter distinction is one that I will continue to hammer home. When, oh when, will liberals come to realize that the Left has been at-best only a part-time and problematic friend? That socialism may work in helping redress injustices (free education and all that) but it is absolutely lousy at generating the sort of economy that is wealthy enough to take on big projects? Good capitalism, the truly competitive and open and accountable kind -- bulwarked by lots of startups and small businesses that unleash creativity -- has always done better under democrats! So why not crow about it? Show the statistics. Embrace the “first liberal,” Adam Smith, who above all denounced and despised crony conspiratorial aristocratic monopolists? Why allow the shills of monopoly to pretend that corporate gigantism has anything, whatsoever, to do with free markets?

Why is Obama allowing Fox to portray him as a socialist? Is he a Keynsian? Yes. But if the energy initiatives are any sign, he also wants creative enterprise to get healthy again.

More Miscellany About Tomorrow

Stefan Jones offers this: Phthalate Exposure Linked to Less-Masculine Play by Boys -- "A study of 145 preschool children reports, for the first time, that when the concentrations of two common phthalates in mothers' prenatal urine are elevated their sons are less likely to play with male-typical toys and games, such as trucks and play fighting." Maybe this will be the issue that makes concerns over toxins crossover to convervativeland. Yes, these plastics are turning your sons into sensitive nancy-boys who are no good at sports! Hey, Culture War wasn’t our idea. But we gotta win it.

Start your home solar system with solar thermal. It’s more mature, with more rapid payback.

The future of tissue culture meat... has been predicted by sci fi for nearly 50 years (including by me). Now there are signs the time may be at hand. "Future flesh" - instead of slaughtered animals - could eliminate 51% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (and 90% of choking victims). A quarter of the earth's land is currently used to grow meat, along with 8% of the world's water. There’s talk of then being able to “taste” extinct critters like Dodos, since regrowing muscle may be possible, even if we can’t clone the whole animal. The meat could be more pure, safer and gene-designed to be healthier.

Alas, the article in H+ is way too sanguine. Getting texture right will take many years. Purists will despise “chicktish” and “pertribeef” for a long time and ranches won’t go away overnight. Also, Industrializing tissue culture is going to be a huge undertaking, messy, using a lot more water and energy and feedstock protein, than boosters predict. At least at first. The zealot author also predicts an end to dairy -- not likely. (See my short story “Piecework” in which “fabricows” are turned to producing a lot more than just milk.)

Nevertheless, meaticulture is potentially a huge breakthrough, perhaps as worldsaving as the solar shingle will be. Above all, it’d be way more moral. And the switch away from killing animals could trigger us finally being contacted by those wise but disgusted advanced beings from ... Vega.

Speaking of disgusting.... yipes, a both humorous and cringeworthy analysis of the evolutionary origins of the human... er... scrotum.

One of the best political blogs - though partisan - is produced intermittently by my friend Russ Daggatt. This entry, about what Rupert Murdoch has been doing to the Wall Street Journal, goes beyond that to how we’re in an era of “assertion politics.” When you are reduced to your red-meat political base, all you have to do, to keep them furious, is assert lots of things without providing a scintilla of evidence. This, of course, is free speech.... till we start paying for it in a “tsunami of McVeighs...” my own aphorism for the rising tide of fomented treason that we can confidently to arrive, as bitter fruit of all the lies.

States in New England top a new set of health and death rankings, while the South still lags.

IBM scientists have created a fast, one-step point-of-care-diagnostic test, based on a silicon chip that uses capillary forces to analyze tiny samples of blood serum for the presence of disease markers.

Sergei Mayburov at the Lebedev Institute of Physics in Moscow suggests that optical communication is a natural process in many cells of body, closely related to photosynthesis.

Scientists at report that playing specific sounds while people slept helped them remember more of what they had learned before they fell sleep, to the point where memories of individual facts were enhanced.

A 25-Year Battery Technology Review .

Two important tips for improving cardiac arrest victims' chances of survival: - (1) Use continuous chest compressions without stopping for mouth-to-mouth breathing (Duh? The chest compressions already fill the lungs. Still, if a top model needs the full old CPR on the beach, I suppose...
(2) - Cool the brain.

Make your “Avatar” action figure come alive, onscreen!

Over the next three years, the Planetary Society will build and fly a series of three solar-sail spacecraft dubbed LightSails powered only by sunlight, first in orbit around the Earth and eventually into deeper space.

The feasibility of redesigning the human condition (such as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering, and our confinement to the planet Earth) will be the focus at Humanity + Summit, Dec. 5-6 in Irvine, California at EON Reality. A lot of the usual suspects will be there.... this time including yours truly... (actually, I’ll be at the pre-conference, the day before, about how Hollywood and mythology are screwing the Enlightenment..)

Well, at least science pushes on...

2009-11-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

First some REALLY important news. Splash! NASA moon strikes found significant water. Having an abundance of water on the moon would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts by providing drinking water and the ingredients for rocket fuel.

No one could be more proud than I am, to see a great scientist's theory play out and be proved before the world. All the more so for a discovery as important as finding water on the moon (in deep-shaded craters at the south pole), which fact may help open the solar system to all humanity. So let me brag right here that this possibility was first broached back in the 1980s by UCSD Professor Jim Arnold, who at the time ran the California Space Institute and honored me by serving on my doctoral committee. (I was studying the mechanism by which the water might have got there in the first place -- comets.)

And while we’re ‘out there’... Apparently, the European Space Agency scanned science fiction stories for ideas that could be used in future space missions - this is the project's report. Further details about the study, together with the fact sheets, images and sources, can be found at
http://www.itsf.org

Name That Decade...

Sure, science has been marching on. But what else?

David Segal of the New York Times quoted me in an article about “what to name the decade that’s about to end.” My suggestion -- the Noughty Aughts signifies what a great big set of zeroes we’ve been living in, since 2000, wallowing amid self-righteousness and self-pity, instead of innovating and looking toward the future. I distinguish “noughty” (meaning zero-ish) from “naughty”... which would imply that at least we had some fun, by being a bit bad! (Alas.)

Note that I don’t single out any particular group to blame for this plague of gloomy self-indulgence. Indeed, lefty-Hollywood seems almost as much at fault - for putting out endless droves of future-hating films -- as the neocons are for their travesty-betrayal called Culture War. Somehow, I hope we can rediscover our capacity, as adults, to restart the can-do spirit of innovation, negotiation and faith in tomorrow.

More Science... High!

So, what would it take for human intelligence to march forward, even during the Noughty Aughts? And might we start sharing the gift of intelligence with others soon? (As in “uplift”?)

”If humans are genetically related to chimps, why did our brains develop the innate ability for language and speech while theirs did not? Scientists suspect that part of the answer to the mystery lies in a gene called FOXP2. When mutated, FOXP2 can disrupt speech and language in humans. Now, a UCLA–Emory University study reveals major differences between how the human and chimp versions of FOXP2 work, perhaps explaining why language is unique to humans.”

Might a simple modification of this one gene have interesting effects upon chimps? Would that fascinating prospect justify germ-line experiments on a great ape? Nobody mentions this question in the article, for obvious reasons. The first person to even broach the idea will meet a firestorm. And yet, it is obvious.

Ah, but always be willing to follow up! See this dissent-critique of the whole FOXP2 “speech gene” thing as a possibly grotesque oversimplification. In fact, we should all be wary of “this is the gene for that”. Yes, defects in single point genes can remove a capability. But single point additions seldom have a direct turn-on effect. Phenotype depends on genotype in the most convoluted and nonlinear ways.

A Pause of Optimism?

Ah, but now, for those who doubt the possibility of progress:“Since the 1950s, while Earth’s population has grown to more than 6 billion people, the large fraction suffering from malnutrition has shrunk from one-third to one-sixth. And although the total number of people suffering from malnutrition remained the same—one billion—this means some 5 billion people, more than ever by far, get enough food to eat today.”

Good news for liberal progressives, who really want to save the world, who are willing to admit that sometimes good news happens, and who think it is no sin to admit it. TERRIBLE news for lefty grouches, who just want to complain and bitch and whine. (When will liberals ever wake up and cut their ties to those jerks? Ah, but I am MUCH harsher on the right. See below.)

BTW, note. The virtuous fish to eat is tilapia. All right, it is kind of bland and needs to be seasoned. (Costco sells nicely spiced frozen tilapia.) But it is the farmed fish with the greatest food efficiency and lowest eco-impact. And, as a vegetarian fish, it accumulates the fewest metals out of the food chain.

Ah, but now for some bad news....

The Decline of the West Correlates With That Of Science Fiction

Doubt it? Take this I just received from my friend, scientist and SF scholar Joe Miller:

”Today I cancelled my 48 yr old membership in the SF Book Club. The woman who answered the phone asked me why. I told her that the club does not seem to do SF anymore--horror, fantasy, DVDs, tv series, everything but. So she asked me for the names of authors who had not appeared recently. I said Greg Benford, Greg Egan, Greg Bear, David Brin, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, etc. She said she did not recognize any of these authors. So I asked her who she would consider a SF author. Her reply was Anne Rice! QED!”

Yipe. Maybe Spengler was right, after all.

News from the Front.. in the War on Science...

Ah, but continuing re civilization’s decline... a new study by the Pew Research Center finds that the GOP is alienating scientists to a startling degree.

Only six percent of America's scientists identify themselves as Republicans; fifty-five percent call themselves Democrats. By comparison, 23 percent of the overall public considers itself Republican, while 35 percent say they're Democrats. This may seem unsurprising, given the red-meat troglodytism of recent years. Still a startling figure. Moreover, since we are talking ablout inarguably the nation’s smartest and most learned people, the Fox-propeled culture warriors have to find some way to wave off what thie implies -- that their movement is nothing less than the rebirth of the infamous Know Nothing Party.

As it turns out, there is only one recourse for rationalizers of the Right to fall back on...
... to preach that “being smart and knowledgeable doesn’t necessarily make one wise.”

Well, when you put it that way, sure. Duh. We all have known bright fools. It’s a truism with some basis in fact.

Ah, but what Fox and Murdoch and the new right culture war machine have done next shows genuine, feral canniness. As a subtext underlying alomost every narrative, they extrapolate this basic truism into a completely new message:

“Being smart and knowledgeable automatically makes someone unwise.”

Sound ridiculous? Absurd? But that is precisely the message being pushed by culture warriors. It is absolutely essential, in order to justify dismissing the consensus held by 99% of the atmospheric scientists in the world, regarding global climate change. It underlay the subordination of science to politics, during the Bush Administration.

In fact, let me be so bold as to claim that this is an unnoticed underpinning to the entire movement, propping up almost everything that the Neocons have pushed, for this last decade, and longer. For, without exactly this foundation assumption, there could be no venom-driven hatred of the Civil Service, or contempt for the advice of well-informed experts.

Let’s take this farther. Leaders of the GOP used to brag that their party was more than a year ahead of Democrats in average education levels. Okay. That seemed obvious and easy to explain. Remember, for generations the dems have included most of the immigrants and the poor. That, alone, affected the averages.

Only now? According to surveys taken across much of the last decade, the average Republican is now behind the average Democrat by more than a year of schooling -- and this despite the Democrats still representing society’s poor and underprivileged.

What could this mean? Other than reflecting a party-migration by nearly everybody in America with real expertise or a post-graduate degree? Including, lately, a great many members of the US military’s Senior Officer Corps. (Except for MBAs, of course. Funny -- they still tilt toward the Grand Old Party.)

Seriously, might the “Republican War on Science” and George Bush’s war against the US Civil Service, plus Culture War animosity in red counties toward Urban America, all be rooted in something deeper and more fundamental than anything that's spoken aloud? Deeper than the run of the mill talking points?

At this juncture, I am willing to wager that Culture War has almost nothing to do with race, or even region. Certainly not classic “conservative” policies, since Barry Goldwater would be a democrat, today. No, it is -- to some large extent -- about something puerile and basic.

Hating smartypantses.

Some Politically Redolent Items

Oh, while we’re in rant mode, see Russ Daggatt's latest!

You’ve all heard my riff -- about how the democrats ought to rediscover the “first liberal” Adam Smith, and steal him from the Republicans, who have warped and perverted and reversed almost everything that Smith wrote and stood for. (Seriously, dems, he’s almost a poster boy for your side!) Now see a wonderful article in which Salon “interviews” Adam Smith -- one of the founders of Classic Liberalism. (And see my letter that follows it.)

Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano called for closer collaboration with foreign partners, more intensive cooperation with local law-enforcement officials, and greater involvement by citizens in watching for and responding to terrorist threats."For too long, we've treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation's collective security"... a line that seems lifted almost verbatim from one of my many essays on this topic.

Meanwhile... illustrating my point about a possible “Tsunami of McVeighs”... we’ve seen plenty of action on the far right. Just to remind folks it can come from the other direction, too. (Though, in this case, what does “right-left” even mean?)

Salon Magazine offers a cogent look at Archie Brown's major new book “The Rise and Fall of Communism. At minimum, read the review. I find it depressing, in conversations with so many contemporaries, how little people know about that fantastic, huge, failed experiment in politics, economics and - ultimately - human nature.

See a clear comparison of red states vs blue states, when it comes to rates of divorce, teen pregnancy and subscription to online porn. Some pretty astonishing placings!

PJ O’Rourke “tweets” the US Constiution!

And finally, from the ridiculous to the sublime -- Stefan Jones found an archive site containing Patrick Farley’s brilliant online strip “Spiders.” I wish even 10% of the folks I have met at CIA, DTRA NSA or ODNI had as much insight into the core problem -- and its ultimate solution -- as Farley exhibits here.

Name The Decade (of miserable whiners)?

2009-11-12T20:16:00.000-08:00

Any NY Times readers, out there? Let me know when an article appears, about naming the decade that’s about to end. I was just interviewed for it, suggesting that the “Noughty Oughts” might signify what a zero-time it was, with America, especially, giving in to every bad habit of self-righteous, dogmatic whining - from both ends of the political spectrum - rather than facing the future with eager, ambitious level-headed, good-natured devotion to our problem-solving heritage.

Note the spelling distinction vs “Naughty Oughts” -- which would at least imply we had some fun being bad. (Of course, using the simpler “Zeroes” to name this decade would imply the same thing.)

And yes, sure, one end of the spectrum was worse than the other, doing us calamitous damage with Culture War. So? Big deal. There’s been plenty of whiny grouchitude from all sides. Look at all the bummer movies from lefty Hollywood, preaching that civilization can’t do anything right. Ever! No, the neocons were merely the worst... not the only... loony curmudgeons in a Nothing Decade when the Baby Boomer generation proved to be a bunch of near useless indignation junkies. Except for the scientists. At least they kept pushing forward, against all odds.

Are better times ahead, with the end of this misbegotten decade? Maybe the Gen Xers - typified by Obama - will be a more cheerfully pragmatic bunch. Less dogmatic. Less obsessed with their own know-it-all rage. Perhaps they will defeat Culture War the only way it can be... by defying their sniveling, grudge-ridden parents and returning us to the spirit of Ben Franklin.

If they do, America may once again be a light into the future, for the world.

Proof that we’ve been crazy troglodytes...

Want to see how previous generations had a much more positive slant on the future? Reported from the SIgma site: There is a site called paleofuture.com that is a joy to visit. It has news clippings, postcards, etc. of how the future was seen at different times, and you can access them by decade. For example: a series of cards that came in boxes of chocolate and which date from 1900s and 1910s (There was a French series and a German one, and it is interesting to compare what scenes each thought interesting. ) But beyond the flying cars and transatlantic dirigibles and the moving sidewalks that they foresaw for the year 2000 or 2010 is the fascinating spectacle that the people wearing the motorized roller skates or stopping their aerodyne at a rooftop restaurant are clearly people of the Edwardian/Ragtime era acting as they have always acted. One of the cards shows a home television -- but naturally it is relaying an opera live performance and naturally the people who are sitting around viewing the image are wearing their opera clothes. "

Humorous? Sure. But compare these visions to the universally dismal projections you see nowadays, like SURROGATES and 2012, or even WALL-E. No wonder science fiction - the most forward looking literature, is in a steep nadir. (In America; it is thriving in places that have lifted their eyes, like China.)

It just goes to show that no previous decade ever hated tomorrow as much as the Oughts did!

Dang, I am looking forward to the Terrific Teens.

----------------
Even though there ARE still good ideas....

Did I mention that science does march on? Even during the neocon madness of the Noughty Oughts, the brightest kept forging ahead, revealing insights that our pragmatic kids may yet turn into wonders. So, as I always do, I’ll list some examples:

Are Black Hole Starships Possible? ”A SBH (small Black Hole) capable of driving a starship produces Hawking radiation which ultimately gives rise to gamma rays, neutrinos, antineutrinos, electrons, positrons, protons, and antiprotons [5]. Gamma ray telescopes are already in use and thereby one might think that a careful search through the gamma ray sky could conceivably turn up evidence of an extraterrestrial starship (cf. [18]). However, gamma rays produced by a SBH in a distant starship might be extremely difficult to detect if the starship is very energy-efficient and has well-collimated exhaust jets. A BH starship using the technology we are proposing would emit gravitational radiation at nuclear frequencies. Current gravitational radiation detection experiments are optimized for much lower frequencies, and would not detect it. We propose building gravity wave detection devices of a different design.”

(Query: Can anyone cite a sci fi novel in which starships use artificially generated black holes to channel the resulting Hawking radiation as thrust? No magical space-warpings, please.)

Sabine Kubesch at the University of Ulm in Germany and her team found that executive function - the ability to focus and avoid distraction improved after 30 minutes of aerobic endurance exercise. "Physical education should be scheduled before important subjects like mathematics and be offered before the first lesson, not at the end of the school day, as is often the case," says Kubesch.

The first global map of the solar system reveals that its edge is nothing like what had been predicted. Neutral atoms, which are the only way to image the fringes of the solar system, are densely packed into a narrow ribbon rather than evenly distributed - a new insight on the interaction between the heliosphere — the vast bubble in which the solar system resides — and surrounding space. Hinting at my story "The Crystal Spheres?"The Voyager 1 craft in 2004and the Voyager 2 craft in 2007 journeyed to opposite sides of this fringe region of the solar system and crossed the termination shock — where the solar wind encounters a shock that precedes the influx of particles drifting into the solar system from interstellar space. Both craft recorded the density of particles and the strength of the magnetic fields. Both Voyager 1 and 2 missed seeing the newly found ribbon because it spans a region between their flight paths.

Spread the word to your female writer friends about Write-em Cowgirls! A helpful site and newsletter by Sharon Cousins.

Terrific riff on Augmented Reality (though you heard most of it here, first! ;-) by Jamais Cascio, in a venue not formerly known for tech friendliness -- The Atlantic.

Ah, but next time some news from the “War on Science...

Contemptuous Memes Part II: "Cycles of History"

2009-11-01T13:44:00.001-08:00

Last time we looked at one enticingly seductive mind trap that we all fall for, now and then -- because it (a) flatters our own egos and (b) nearly always seems so well-justifed. Contempt for the Masses seems to come as naturally as breathing. And you (or I) never happen to be one of the innumerable fools, out there. You (or I) are in the know!

Now we'll move on to another silly notion that folks routinely seem to love to fall for. That history runs in patterns and even predictable cycles. Here's the second half of that infamous "Tytler Quotation" we examined last time -- a touchstone of modern neoconservative cant. The portion that claims there are predictable patterns that control the destiny of peoples and nations.

"The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness toâ€¨complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

First, let us avow and admit that the Left can get just as teleological and mystical. Karl Marx's forecasts about the inevitable path of human development may not have been cyclical, but they were just as stupid, built upon a series of fabulated Just-So stories that were then twisted to excuse mass murder. What seems to attract mystics of the Right to the more cyclic models, like Tytler's, would seem to be their attraction to the past. Marx saw history as something to be built upon, never to repeat. Cyclicalists see the past as endlessly relevant and revealing of our fore-doomed pattern. ("What was, will be.") This is more suitable for the fanatical wing that is filled with nostalgist-romantics, instead of transcendentalist-romantics. A definite difference, if a small one.

Anyway, Tytler's riff begins with a preposterous premise (offered as an "of course" axiom) that societies all collapse at a given age. A notion wholly unsupported, across the continents and ages. It may be that dynasties and even city states fade over such a very rough time frame... (though tell it to the Plantagenets and to Venice). Even so, the overall cultures, of which they were part, tended to keep on flourishing, over vastly longer time scales. Indeed, the West only "fell" once. And then, only if you ignore the whole eastern half of the Mediterranean.

But never mind all that. This concept has been rife -- and fruitless at predicting actual events -- since forever. For example, almost a century ago, all the chattering classes were going on and on about Oswald Spengler's book, THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, which claimed that the First World War was sure evidence of the imminent collapse of Western Civilization... from senescence, decadence and old age.

Oh, sure, there were many visible ways that, in Spengler's time, the faults and contradictions of nationalism, capitalism and primitive economies failed to cope with the onrushing tide of powerful technologies. And the world did spiral into hell around the middle of the Twentieth century. But there was nothing decadent about the dynamism with which the western democracies bounced back, confronted Hitler, then chose Marshall's path of steady strength and development-through-trade, as a strategy for dealing with communist expansionist empires. If decadence consists of going to the moon, exploring the solar system and the cell and the atom, purging ourselves of age-old prejudices, liberating education and loosening the guild-constraints on expert knowledge -- well, then here's to decadence!

It's easy to laugh at Spengler now. Though one does feel a chill in the air as, periodically, our country and civilization seems to toy with cowardice and rejection of progress. Contempt for the Masses combines with our human propensity for pattern-recognition, as we sometimes cry out "Aha! I see what's happening."

(One example (mea culpa) is my own schtick, in which I portray Rupert Murdoch as Jefferson Davis, in pushing Culture War as a way to re-ignite Phase Three of the American Civil War.)

Among the most insidious of these patterns that people periodically perceive -- (and, ironically, it is held most strongly by those who proclaimed "morning in America!") -- is the nostalgic-romantic-cynical grouse that: "we're past our prime."

Cycles of Generations?

What's the latest of these cyclical patterns to make the rounds? Well, it happens to be one that mixes the usual pessimist view with dollops that are oddly hopeful and even quite rousing.

My friend and international economic pundit John Mauldin is (in his words) "a huge fan of the work of Neil Howe. His book, The Fourth Turning, has turned out to be stunningly prophetic. Uncomfortably so. A roughly 80 year cycle has been repeating itself for centuries in the Anglophile world, broken up into four generations or turnings. We have begun what Howe called many years ago The Fourth Turning." By this, Howe means a time of crisis, similar to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Depression/WWII period, all of which called upon the strength of a "hero generation" to rescue civilization from the ruinous danger inflicted by earlier "prophets," "nomads," and such.

First the bad news. I responded to John that I am deeply unimpressed with Howe. My own record, predicting the fall of the Berlin Wall, a false Fukayaman "end of history," and then a hyped up tussle with macho Islam -- is inarguably far more specific and far better than Howe's. Heck, most of my Science Fiction writing colleagues have done better, too. (SF gets no respect!)

To be fair, there are some enticing patterns to recognize... e.g the roughly eighty year (a human lifetime) span separating the crisis of the American Revolution from the Civil War, from the Depression/WWII crisis to the one that supposedly will sweep upon us, very soon. (Cheery thought!) In each case (1) "Heroes" stoically and courageously resolved the emergency, then strove to raise their kids in security they never knew. A security that turned the next immediate generations into (2)a stifled, silent generation (e.g. kids of the 1950s) and then (2) rebellious, individualist, transcendentalist egomaniac "prophets" (the Boomers), followed by a "nomad" generation (Gen X, including its first president, Obama) which grew up under chaotic home lives...

...followed by another "hero" generation, that will presumably fix the mess created by the boomers. (A phrase I use decades ago.) One forecaste I think Howe gets spot on: "The Baby Boomers will still be tearing and screaming at each other, when they are hobbling around retirement homes."

What Howe does is what humans do... look for patterns and then find (voila!) what they are looking for. So-called "cycles of history" are among the most pernicious of these wish-find patterns. People often attribute such thinking - unfairly - to the great historian Arnold Toynbee, because he spent a lot of time talking about them. But in then end, he debunked them. (Ask and I'll tell you what Toynbee REALLY considered to be the factor that explains history, especially the rise or fall of great nations.)

No, as I mentioned earlier, the great Cyclicalist who transfixed our parents and grandparents - but who everyone has now forgotten, was Spengler. (He also said that "optimism is cowardice." What a marroon.) But what makes fellows like Howe especially distressing is that they are positing a cyclical determinism that dismisses our ability to take such "wheels" of destiny and modify them, perhaps even learning to steer.

In fact, I find illusory "cycles" far less rewarding than the notion of
"attractor states"... or pitfalls that seem relentlessly to pull in cultures,
because of repetitive traits in human nature.

Oligarchic feudalism is one such attractor. (Find the exceptions: agrarian
societies that avoided this trap. I can name only eight.) Another attractor
is fear-driven xenophobia. Machismo is one more. Put a dozen or so of these
together and you start getting a really good picture of our tragic history. (And yes, because these themes keep recurring, matters can thus look a bit cyclical. But that's like saying the fundamental reason that a car moves is because the wheels turn.)

But leadership also matters, e.g. Athenian democracy did not fail till Pericles died, and then just barely. And that is where miracles keep happening to America. here America finds NEW attractor states.... bad presidents are followed by good ones, citizenship triumphs (barely) over anomie and cynicism, and seminal decisions transform the world.

Example. America's current deep indebtedness is portrayed as a pit of ruin. Yes, it is a pit, a difficult one. But nobody looks at what we got, in exchange for it.

What did we get for the debt, other that lots of expensive cars and cheap tube socks?

Well, we saved the world. Because of anti-mercantalist trade patterns, set up by Marshall, Truman and Acheson, and then Ike. Pax Americana was the first empire ever to eschew and reverse mercantalist temptations. The result was a steady export-driven UPLIFTING of Europe and Japan, then Taiwan, Korea, China, and so on... till 2/3 of the world is now out of grinding poverty and sending their kids to school.

90% of that progress happened because Americans spent trillions on crap we never needed. It is an accomplishment far greater than going to the moon or defeating Hitler. We'll never get any credit. But we did it.

So we've reached an end to our ability to lift the world, all by ourselves? So
they will now have to pull their own weight while we resume saving and fight down the debt left over from 30 wastrel years? So we have some problems? Big deal.

Americans can do anything. Anything! So long as we shrug off Murdochian propaganda and start thinking like adults again.

I just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again, for the 20th time. Dang. I don't care about the space stations. What matters is that we are better PEOPLE than Kubrick thought we'd be, by now.

It's time to be ambitious again.

Contempt for the Masses - a modern curse?

2009-10-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

I want to riff upon some common drug-highs that most people partake-of. One is the alluring condition of despising our pitiably stupid neighbors. Another is the temptation to believe that history comes and goes in "cycles."

first some news...

Looking for something to help you through the long commute? Or to listen-to while basking under the sunlamp? Recorded Books has just issued the full book-on-tape version of BRIGHTNESS REEF read by George K Wilson. This will soon be followed by INFINITY'S SHORE and HEAVEN'S REACH.

H+ asked David Brin, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs Hall, Vernor Vinge, and others: "Is a Terminator-like scenario possible? And if so, how likely is it?"

See a Planetary Report on the discovery of a likely "skylight" opening in a volcanic lava tube on the moon. It suggests that such lava tubes currently exist and offer large subterranean spaces for possible human use as shelters, in future colonization.

"Albedo Yachts" and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change? A proposal to create 1500 robot ships that use wind power to inject micron sized droplets into the atmosphere. Sounds better than most forms of geoengineering because it ivolves no toxins and can simply be stopped at any time. But I wonder, might these wind powered vessels be combined with wind powered STIRRING of shallow sea bottoms (as depicted in my novel Earth? This stirring would fertilize desert ocean areas the way nature does it, instead of through the proposed method of dumping powdered iron (which has unintended consequences like acidification.) In contrast mud-stirring has no conceivable way to do harm because it replicates nature's own method.

Two Victoria University professors who specialize in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their disturbingly titled new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living. The couple has assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them. "If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda Vale said.

...and now for the featured topic...

Are your neighbors all stupid?

This topic came up last time, flowing out of my observations about the recent movies, Surrogates. And, while I have groused about the obvious - even blatant - overlaps with both my novel Kiln People and the widely distributed Leslie Dixon screenplay, that was not what bugged me moist about the Bruce Willis film. Rather, it was the dismally uniform premise -- shared by far too many Hollywood productions -- that all new technologies are inherently evil and that they will automatically be horribly misused by nearly all human beings.

Look, any sensible person is of two minds about "the masses," recollecting
Churchill's line that democracy is the worst form of government... except for every other that's been tried. We have seen how flawed popular government can be. I am mindful of what happened to Periclean Athens and to Republican Florence.

Indeed, when Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had erected on the White House - and got adulation for calling upon his followers to "think only of this morning!" - I knew that we'd be in for a generation of spendthrift foolishness. Thirty years of delays in doing much about energy independence coincided with virtual abandonment of ambition in science or space, while we spent ourselves into deep debt, based upon a Supply-Side theory that made no sense, even before it was disproved. The left did chime in, with idiocies of its own. And then came a high-treason madness called Culture War...

Oh, no question that our neighbors have given us plenty of reason to suspect them of -- ahem, at best -- shortsighted and parochial thinking.

But note that this reaction spans all boundaries of politics, whether or not the facts support your particular prejudice. Surface rationalizations differ, from left to right, but we all suckle the same, deeply smug fantasies from popular culture. The underlying inclination is too common to ignore, flowing from movies into real life.

If the shared theme that drives most Hollywood plots is Suspicion of Authority (SOA), then the most common background assumption is that the majority of people around the hero (and hence, around you ) are nincompoops.

Of course, that ninnie majority never, ever includes you.

Defending the masses

Of course, I am human. Indeed, this very screed reflects a meta-irony... that I feel contempt for the masses, because they give in to this blandished hypnotic trip so easily!

And yet, since contempt for the masses is the most common reflex, I am forced, out of sheer contrariness, to stand up for the other side. The "people" after all, have repeatedly been polled as much more willing to invest in new energy
than our aristocracy ever was.

Moreover, there are plenty of counter-examples that suggest the opposite. For example, recall the era of the "Clinton Surplus?" Members of Congress salivated over spending it all on favored programs. Others promoted giant tax cuts, especially for the wealthy classes. Amid all of this, only two groups spoke up for using the surplus instead to retire the national debt. Those two groups were economists and ... the general public.

It was the middle class "populace" who wanted to pay off the debt before getting a tax cut! Their forward-looking citizenship was far greater than the "gimme!" attitude of most of the aristocracy.

This runs diametrically opposite to the cynics' favorite quotation, varously
attributed to "Tytler" or to Alex Tyler --

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to
complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage."

As it happens, this spurious "quotation" has also been repeatedly proved to be utter and complete drivel. It has taken an unprecedented propaganda campaign to drive wedges into and between components of the middle class, in America. And even so, it is still the bourgeoisie that not only puts up most of the taxes but also relentlessly proves to be the caste the least interested in "largesse" and the most willing to pay for the civilization that they live in.

... next time... "cycles of history"...?

Surrogates -- substituting for good story

2009-10-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, time for a commentary that many of you have been waiting for -- my thoughts about the recent Bruce Willis movie, Surrogates.

I've been (as you might expect) getting a lot of mail about it, so let's start with some facts. The film is based upon a comic book by Robert Venditti that appeared some years after my novel KILN PEOPLE.

Also worth noting, for purposes of a timeline, is the screenplay for KILN PEOPLE that was created by the great scriptor Leslie Dixon (Overboard, Mrs.Doubtfire, Pay it Forward). It circulated some years ago at Paramount Studios and far beyond, so clearly a priority sequence was well-known, by those interested in the basic idea.

But are the stories really similar? Let's see

A detective sends a technologically-made duplicate of himself into a world where everybody makes copies in order to deal with the world risk-free. The detective's duplicate seeks the inventor of this technology, who has become dangerously estranged from the company that he founded and who plots its downfall.

Along the way, there occurs a rare case of actual murder. Meanwhile, in one of the zones where only real humans are allowed, fanatics rail that all this copying-addiction undermines the human soul... an so on....

Check, check check... Ah, well, they say that Hollywood only steals if they respect you. Sigh.

All of that might be expected to stir fumes at the back of my neck. But I went to see the movie with an open mind, willing to give it a chance, in hopes it would at least turn out to be a great, rip-snorting sci fi adventure that (for a change) has a little originality, as well as some brains and heart. Is that really too much to ask?

At first sight, one of the similarities between KILN PEOPLE and Surrogates is something that I approve-of at a philosophical level... both stories give the "new thing" to the People -- to everybody -- and follow how this changes society.

Few sci fi films do that. Generally, the "new thing" is hoarded in secret or monopolized by the mighty, giving you a simple - if dumb - hero vs oppressive authority plot. Okay, so let's give Surrogates two points for breaking from that cliche. Well, that cliche.

Of course, whenever the People do adopt something new, wholesale, that generally leads to another hackneyed theme. But, hold that thought.

Alas, to save money, Jonathan Mostow, the director of Surrogates chose to eliminate all futuristic aspects. Hence, we have mind projection and puppet automatons... and everything else is left exactly as today. Hey, I understand budget concerns. But there are lots of cool things -- directly related to copying -- that would have cost next-to-nothing to portray...

...or, at least, he might have entertainingly (as I do) show some of the range of things that people would use copies for! How about gladiatorial matches in souped-up bodies! Hyper-X-sports in which no one comes back "alive"! Historical battle re-enactments, with real bullets! Expeditions to other planets, where the surrogate travels cheaply, without life-support, then wakens and lets an astronaut -- or paying customers -- take that "first step for mankind."

The possibilities are endless, as I show in KILN PEOPLE. But, as we'll see, this movie is not about people using self-duplication to expand the realm of the possible.

(We did catch a glimpse of some military applications. But even that was stunningly unimaginative. What, no soldiers manifesting as cheetahs or ogres or dragons? Two legs are soooo slow.)

As for the vast range of ways that regular folks would use their surrogates... other than for playing at being sexy... or the opposite sex...? Nah. All people use this technological breakthrough for is to look good.

Seriously, that's pretty much it. Looking good. Period. In fact, that self-indulgent sin propels the entire personal side of the plot. Um... snore.

(My wife suggested an alternative that might have driven everybody to keep their human bodies indoors. What if the air had become toxic? One also wonders what would happen to human reproduction rates in a world where all sex is via machinery.... But, as we'll see, any probing of the details would interfere in the main purpose of Surrogates -- which is to preach a very black and white, Crichtonian morality play.)

Look, there were moments in the film that seemed marginally clever. Some cool effects. Even a crackle or two of snappy dialogue. Go see it, sure.

And yet, in this, just about the only adventure/scifi film in years to NOT be based upon the sequel of a comicbook sequel, we still see both director and studio choosing to go with the knee-jerk, go-to lesson of every tiresomely cliched Hollywood flick...

... always boiling down to Michael Crichton's preachy but classic message -- "there are things mankind should never do." Pushing the ultimately poisonous line that we should always fear and loathe technology.

That is the core message nowadays, no? Change is always, always, always, always bad. A lesson preached by privileged, comfortable, tech-empowered elites who have benefited fantastically from change. Women and men who would likely screech in agony if they had to live the way any of their ancestors did, during any of the 20,000 generations of previous human existence.

Think about it. Do these Hollywood studio folks -- most of them devout Democrats -- ever wonder why our civilization is turning anti-science and giving itself over to superstition? They wring their hands over a rising age of culture war and lost-confidence, while they are churning out relentless propaganda preaching the same tedious message -- that progress is hopeless and technology only menacing. And that the default moral and wise choice should always be Just Say No To Change.

Even worse, nearly every product they put out proclaims that the People are always stupid.

Some democrats.

Alas, in fact, that final, noxious cliche seems to be the utter heart and core of Surrogates. The tired-old lesson that you cannot trust the masses with a burnt match, let alone the Next Thing.

In this film, absolutely everybody -- except for a few abstemious fanatics -- falls for the addictive trap of copying insatiably, neglecting their real bodies and real lives, transferring their sense of self entirely into machine versions and neglecting the flesh upon which life depends.

Oh, sure, some people would do that, in much the same way that some now abuse alcohol. And dealing with the fallout from this minority's stupidity might make an interesting plot. But here's the key point. All known addictions d not ensnare the majority -- folks who resist temptation use good judgment, exercise moderation, and manage to lead balanced, wholesome lives, despite being offered a New Thing.

But in the world of Surrogates, it is all or nothing. There are only teetotaling prude-fanatics or several billion rolling drunks. Absolutely everybody who uses the New Thing stupidly abuses it, and so must be saved from temptation by an act of overwhelmingly self-righteous and simplistic prudity.

Here is where, fundamentally and morally, this film breaks with me and my own, earlier, take on the question: "what if we could all make copies of ourselves?" In fact, both the film Surrogates and graphic novel seem bent on directly refuting and rejecting the premise of KILN PEOPLE... that human civilization sometimes picks up new tools, overcomes some mistakes and faces interesting problems, learns to deal with them, and moves on.

Given Hollywood's slavish devotion to cliche -- and to portraying their fellow citizens as mindless sheep -- is it any wonder the producers chose Venditti's approach over mine? (And let there be no mistake; Leslie Dixon is important and powerful enough in Hollywood that her KILN PEOPLE script was read by some of the people in the decision chain, who chose the cliched approach, instead of one that might head in bold directions.)

But soft, let's step back and finish on a charitable note. For, to reiterate, at least Surrogates is one of the only non-sequel films that's come out in a long time, based upon something that most viewers haven't seen before. Everyone involved deserves some credit for that, despite the malignant deeper message.

(And, of course, its box office fizzle will teach the wrong lesson; don't ever try to be original, ever again!)

As for the "steal" aspects... ah well, it's not the first time, and it won't be the last time that I'll write missives like this one. It's a town where everybody can shout the word "coincidence" before they can say "Mama."

Anyway, what can I do? Just hope that people will spread internet buzz and say "Hey! Go to Kiln People for the original concept, done a whole lot better, by the original author." And, maybe, quality will endure a bit better than cliches.

Good stuff does have one advantage over bad. It stands up better, with time.

Jiu Jitsu in Afghanistan

2009-10-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

All right, here's the deal. I 'm paid to point things out that others haven't noticed. Not all the under-examined concepts that fizz out of my contrary-cracked mind prove right or even sane! But I am pretty good at showing that this or that twist should at least be put on the table, and dismissed properly. And so, I'm going to toss something out there. It is far from the most preposterous alternative I've come up with. In fact, this idea should work! Even though it hasn't a prayer of being tried.

Let the Taliban take over Kandahar and parts of Pashtunistan.

Yes, it sounds terrible. Defeatist. Humiliating. Sending exactly the wrong message to our Pakistani quasi-allies and giving the jihadists reason to cheer...

Or would it? Think. When did we do our very best against the Taliban?

During the initial post-9/11 intervention, when they had something to lose. Something that could easily be taken from them. Guerillas are at their best sneaking around in barely more than the clothes on their backs, sniping in target-rich environments. They know that they are absolutely terrible at holding onto discrete, well-defined territory, let alone governing it. Not against a coalition of modern powers.

Now combine this with the following news article from McClatchy (10/16/09): The U.S. military can send only about 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in the next three months without putting excessive strains on the Army and Marine Corps , but the top Afghanistan commander has said he needs more than twice that number to have the best chance of success, military and administration officials told McClatchy.

Put aside for now the near-treason of a previous administration that left our military in such a state. (When Bill Clinton left office after a fantastically successful Balkans Intervention, every single US brigade was rated "fully combat ready." When Bush left office, NONE were rated even close to fully combat ready.) The significant point here is that we simply haven't the resources to simply "police-down" a wild-ass insurgency in every valley of Afghanistan, also known as "the place that empires go, to die."

So let's try a little thought experiment. Suppose we talked Karzai into "ordering" US and NATO forces out of some well-defined area called Pashtunistan. The Pashtuns are the principal tribe causing trouble in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. A high fraction are fanatically conservative, the ones who want their women wrapped up in burkhas and who banned both music and kite-flying. Suppose Karzai said "I've struck a deal -- limited autonomy for the Taliban in this region, if they'll agree to pull out everywhere else."

Of course the Taliban will agree... and of course they'll intend, first chance, to stab Karzai in the back and resume their campaign. That's given. Only think:

1) During the two month transition, you'll see transfers of population. Fanatics hurrying to Kandahar and moderates moving out. Especially any woman with any sense of pride or self-preservation. Drawing fanatics away from the rest of Afghanistan and Pakistan and concentrating them in a place that finds itself almost without women? Um... what's not to like?

2) The new Pashtunistan will happen to have boundaries that allied forces can seal, at least somewhat. It is arguable that less heroin will escape that way, than currently does, through today's widely-cast net. In any event, trade will be at the mercy of the surrounders, not the surrounded. Moreover, as part of the deal, the radicals will have to first turn over strong points and passes to the Pakistani Army.

3) This turns the civil war into a tribal one. It should cause support for the government to rise everywhere outside Pashtunistan, as Uzbeks and Tajiks and others remember what life was like, before 2002. Especially as Kandahar devolves back into incompetent rule, poverty and sheer nastiness.

(Let the Taliban cry out for donations and help from radicalists in Al Qaeda and the Arab world. Let those funds flow. It won't be enough. Nothing can be enough. Those sources will dry up.)

4) War will resume. It is inevitable. Jihadists cannot grasp satiability. They'll start attacking, again. And, when they do, we can simply take it all away from them again, in a matter of days, fighting on our terms, not theirs, to be greeted as liberators, even by the Pashtuns of Kandahar. Oh, in trying to defend fixed positions, Taliban troops will be at their most vulnerable.

Sure, it's a bit cynical, manipulative and callous... almost like the way the British behaved, during their imperial era. The fig leaf of Karzai ordering this would be essential. But really, when all is said, where are the failure modes? For example, suppose the new Pashtunistan government surprised us by showing competence, skill and restraint, separating from Afghanistan and joining the community of nations. Even if they are hostile to us, tell me how that would be worse than the present situation? In fact, the more they have to lose, the more likely they will fear a repeat of 2002.

Oh, and then there's this. A Taliban entity, sitting once more on the border of Iran? Let the mullahs sweat that out.

All right, this doesn't fit into tidy left-right boxes. Anyway, I despise that metaphor. We need to be idealists, but pragmatic ones who are capable of jiu jitsu, when it seems called for. And, when it comes to Afghanistan, jiu jitsu is always called for.

Cool Science Reminders We're Living in The Great Renaissance

2009-10-13T21:34:00.000-07:00

I’ll be posting my long-delayed appraisal of the movie Surrogates, shortly. But meanwhile, here’s a raft of links and other cool items that remind us that -- despite efforts to turn civilization toward know-nothing foolishness, we still live in an era of enlightenment and wonders.

See Shawn Otto -- one of the driving forces behind the science Debate 2008 endeavor to lift the national and worldwide awareness of science as a driver of public policy, address the 2009 Nobel Conference.

See a marvelous series of cartoon satires of “caveman dire-warning sci fi” -- especially if there had been a paleolithic Michael Crichton.

COOL STUFF

The Worldwide Lexicon is a Firefox translator that makes browsing foreign language sites transparent and automatic. Just open a page, and if it is in a foreign language it will translate it, first using human edited translations submitted by other users, then via machine translation (obviously not as good, but usually sufficient to understand what is going on). The process is similar to Wikipedia in many respects, except focused on translation, and sharing interesting websites. You can fetch a beta version at www.worldwidelexicon.org Terrific stuff. Actually, I am writing (both in my novel & nonfiction) about how this era may represent - metaphorically -- the end of the “dispersal from the Tower of Babel." Think about how that applies! Oh, but it is a metaphor with resonance that goes MUCH farther -- one of many bits of scripture that can be used as potent weapons for enlightenment, in the culture wars.

Researchers from Australia and Singapore are developing a wireless ad-hoc mesh networking technology that uses mobile handsets to share and carry information including high quality video. The mesh network will make use of Bluetooth or Wifi and could be used at a large sporting event, conference, or even a crowded city centre during an emergency, to swap information between handsets - even if the mobile phone network was offline. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/157220,researchers-developing-free-mobile-mesh network.aspx

Of course, this relates to one thing I have been ranting about forever -- the near-criminal lack of a backup capability for all our cell phones to be able to pass texts, peer-to-peer (P2P) in the event of a Katrina-type (or worse) crisis. Those who know how it could be done, and who have refused, for dismally silly rationalized reasons, should expect to be sued, for everything they have, the next time such a crisis strikes. They’ve been warned.

Meanwhile, a, I good or what? ”A new internet game is about to be launched which allows 'super snooper' players to plug into the nation's CCTV cameras and report on members of the public committing crimes. The 'Internet Eyes' service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers. Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to £1,000.”

A fun rumination on the rise and fall of the Great Books....”For all their shortcomings, the Great Books—along with many other
varieties of middlebrow culture—reflected a time when the liberal arts
commanded more respect. They were thought to have practical value as a
remedy for parochialism, bigotry, social isolation, fanaticism, and
political and economic exploitation. The Great Books had a narrower
conception of "greatness" than we might like today, but their
foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly
intellectual.” --

DB adds: The Great Books arose out of the fertile, if weird minds of Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, who together thoroughly transformed the University of Chicago into one of America’s strangest and most intellectually fertile higher institutions of learning. The Great Books concept was modeled somewhat after the “Seven Liberal Arts” program that Martianus Minneus Felix Capella devised, to arrest intellectual decline during the fall of the Roman Empire. I am proud to own a copy of the Great Books set... and have mostly found it useful to point-to, while telling my kids ABOUT the big minds of the past... most of whose actual words, insights and passages have almost no direct usefulness in the modern age. But knowing a lot about such people, and the context of their thinking, is vital. And some of them are absolutely essential to read in the original, even today. Karl Marx, Adam Smith, the Federalist Papers, Freud’s Original Introductory Lectures (and little else from Freud), these a person must at least try to understand in depth, in order to grasp the issues of our day.

SCIENCE

See a wondrous UV portrait of the Andromeda galaxy -- a mosaic of images from SWIFT.

And now a weird sidestep of “dark energy.” An accelerating wave of expansion following the Big Bang could push what later became matter out across the universe, spreading galaxies farther apart the more distant they got from the wave’s center. If this did happen, it would account for the fact that supernovae were dim—they were in fact shoved far away at the very beginning of the universe. But this would’ve been an isolated event, not a constant accelerating force. Their explanation of the 1998 observations does away with the need for dark energy. The theory is attractive because it describes the effect astronomers observed using only general relativity. It also provides a mechanism for a scenario that’s been discussed in cosmology for some time, the “bubble of underdensity”—the idea that the Earth might be in an area with a low mass density compared to the rest of the universe, which would account for the distance of the supernovae. .... This model would require Earth to be at the center of the universe. In other words, it would violate the Copernican principle, which states that the Earth does not have a special, favored place and that the universe is essentially homogeneous.

Is your city prepared for a home-made nuke? (Somebody gist this article for the rest of us?) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327163.900-is-your-city-prepared-for-a homemade-nuke.html

For those who always wanted to see through walls. The way radio signals vary in a wireless network can reveal the movement of people behind closed doors. Variance-based radio tomographic imaging processes the signals to reveal signs of movement. They've even tested the idea with a 34-node wireless network using the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol. Signal strength at any point in a network is the sum of all the paths the radio waves can take to get to the receiver. Any change in the volume of space through which the signals pass, for example caused by the movement of a person, makes the signal strength vary. So by "interrogating" this volume of space with many signals, picked up by multiple receivers, it is possible to build up a picture of the movement within it.

Champions of free will, take heart. A landmark 1980s experiment that purported to show free will doesn't exist is being challenged. In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded

Nerve cells will grow and generate synapses with an artificial component, in this case, plastic beads coated with a substance that encourages adhesion and attracts the nerve cells, McGill University researchers have found. This approach bypasses the need to force
nerve cells to artificially grow long distances... interestingly, the article doesn’t even mention paraplegics. The government of England plans to put 20,000 more problem families under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their own homes to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on
time and eat proper food.

A 10- to 20-megawatt plasma rocket could propel missions to Mars in just 39 days, whereas conventional rockets would take six months or more.

3GS is the first iPhone with an internal compass - Augmented Reality (AR) apps use your phone's GPS to know where you are and the compass to know which direction you're looking at. Then these two apps can tell you what you're looking at that's written up in Wikipedia and/or Cyclopedia -- the beginnings of augmented reality that I first depicted in EARTH.

Increasing the activity of beta brain waves can make people move in
slow motion.

By disabling a gene involved in an important biochemical signaling pathway involving a protein called target of rapamycin (TOR), scientists have discovered a way to mimic the anti-aging benefits of caloric restriction, allowing mice to live longer and healthier lives. nu? I still hold to my wager. We’ll find that humans already throw most of these switches. For us, it won't be that easy.

By connecting electrodes and radio antennas to the nervous systems of beetles, University of California, Berkeley engineers were able to make them take off, dive and turn on command. Funded by DARPA, the project's goal is to create fully remote-controlled insects able to perform tasks such as looking for survivors after a disaster.

Sidewiki, a new Google Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer, allows users to publicly annotate any page on the web, and could become a universal commenting system. Google could use sentiment analysis to see users' reactions to a page and then influence search
results.

Speaking of Augmented reality -- with Mobilizy's just-released Augmented Reality Mark-up Language (ARML), programmers can more easily create location-based content for AR applications -- the equivalent of HTML for the Web.

Scientists Make Paralyzed Rats Walk Again After Spinal-cord Injury.

A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy. That equation, developed in 1960 by U.S. astronomer Frank Drake, estimates the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in our galaxy by considering the number of stars with planets that could support life. The new equation, under development by planetary scientists at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, aims to develop a single index for habitability based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or not there are benign environmental conditions. Ah... but... Astrobiologist and physicist Paul Davies, of the University of Arizona in Tuscon, said it was a "pointless exercise" as the equation refers only to life as we know it. I tend to agree with Paul.

The “State of the World” report makes for powerful reading.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-thermal power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

Is The Atlantic finally emerging from its love affair with troglodytic postmodernist reactionary anti-futurism? Perhaps, if they are publishing Jamais Cascio. “Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?”

3D holograms that can be touched with bare hands have been developed by researchers from the University of Tokyo. Called the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, the hologram projector uses an ultrasound phenomenon called acoustic radiation pressure to create a pressure sensation on a user's hands, which are tracked with two Nintendo Wiimotes.

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers have created a prototype micro robot that can crawl through the human body. It is only a millimeter in diameter and 14 millimeters long, so it can get into the body's smallest areas. It is powered by either actuation through magnetic force located outside the body, or through an on-board battery.

New terahertz-detecting technology could make "intimate" body-search-at-a-distance cameras as cheap and easy as conventional video shots.

Open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators, say collective-intelligence analysts.

Okay, there's lots more. But let me part with this. Anyone who thinks that all this cientific discover doesn't have profound <i>theological implications, akin to any conceivable meaning of the word "revelation</i> has to have a hole in his head. We are picking up His tools... whether He exists or not, that is impressive stuff. Any Father worthy of respect would be proud for us.

A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war...

2009-10-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

An article on Salon asks "Why Can't We Have Smarter Right Wingers?"

It's been my own stark plaint for a decade -- and not from any lefty reflex. Rather, as one who openly avows some libertarian and classic "conservative" views, sprinkled in a mostly-progressive goulash.

Shouldn't there be clear-headed voices, articulating the attractiveness of balanced budgets, national readiness, genuinely competitive free enterprise, and caution in international entanglements? Isn't it good to have someone in the room demanding: "Prove that something really is broken, before using the the blunt instrument of the state to fix it"?

I've long felt that the best minds of the right had useful things to contribute to a national conversation -- even if their overall habit of resistance to change proved wrongheaded, more often than right. At least, some of them had the beneficial knack of targeting and criticizing the worst liberal mistakes, and often forcing needful re-drafting.

That is, some did, way back in when decent republicans and democrats shared one aim -- to negotiate better solutions for the republic.

Does The New Right Even Have an Agenda Anymore?

Alas, today's Republican Establishment seems not only incapable but uninterested in negotiation or deliberation. It isn't just the dogmatism, or lockstep partisanship, or Koolaid fantasies spun -up by the Murdoch-Limbaugh hate machine. Heck, even though "culture war" is verifiably the worst direct treason against the United States of America since Fort Sumter, that isn't what boggles most.

It's the stupidity. The vast and nearly uniform dumbitudinousness of ignoring what has happened to conservatism, a transformation of nearly all of the salient traits of Barry Goldwater from:

* prudence to recklessness

* accountability to secrecy

* fiscal discretion to spendthrift profligacy

* consistency to hypocrisy

* civility to nastiness

* international restraint to recklessness

* efficiency to no-tomorrow wastrelness

* personal rectitude to flagrant licentiousness

* cleanliness to filthy habits

* logic to unreason

...and more, reversing:

* from respect for science to incantatory voodoo

* from an almost pedantic love of history to near total ignorance of the past

* from individual-based deliberation to lockstep party-line voting

* from belief in federalism and states' rights to excusing monolithic presidential power

* from negotiated problem-solving to strawman-based politics

* from a bookish love of statistics to justification by anecdote

* from country-first patriotism to the flagwaving kind that can instantly turn into rants about secession, the killing of civil servants and praying for the president to fail, even if that means the country going down with him.

This is not about classic left-vs-right anymore. (As if that metaphor ever held cogent meaning.) Not when every measure of national health that conservatives ought to care about -- from budget balancing to small business startups, to military readiness, to States' Rights, to the economy, to individual liberty, to control over immigration at our borders -- does vastly and demonstrably better under democrats. With nearly 100% perfection.

(Fact avoidance is even worse when you encompass ALL of history. Ask today's conservatives which force destroyed more freedom and nearly every competitive market, across 5,000 years. Which foe of liberty and enterprise did Adam Smith despise? Hint: it wasn't "socialism" or "government bureaucrats.")

No. Given their lack of any other tangible accomplishments across the last fifteen years, one must to conclude that the core agenda of Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch and their petroprince backers really is quite simple.

To find out just how far they can push "culture war" toward a repeat of 1861.

Is the Agenda Civil War?

Does that sound florid and paranoid? Well, I do try to be entertaining!

Anyway, bear with me a bit, because the parallels are eerie. Not only on the geographical electoral map, but in the way that vast swathes of the South would only see or hear just one point of view (in uniformly pro-slavery newspapers, back in 1861, or via talk radio today), or propounded from every white pulpit -- an incessant drumbeat of regional, ethnic and partisan hatred. With predictable results: the demolition of national discourse, along with the murder of census workers and the bubbling froth of a new wave of Timothy McVeighs.

Obviously, this is blatantly the agenda of Murdoch and Limbaugh and their foreign backers, since they do not even offer their own measures or agenda for deliberative negotiation with the party and president chosen by the American majority. They never even try to assert that any tangible improvements in national health occurred during their long tenure in power. Indeed, can you name any effective accomplishment -- consistently pursued and unambiguously achieved -- other than to push America toward Civil War?

Why they have been doing this is open to speculation. I have my theories. You may have yours.

But even without knowing their true motives, one can look ahead to outcomes. And so, I have to ask these fellows one question --

Let's say that you succeed. Suppose, driven by your potent and effective propaganda, America's "red" population rises up and Culture War finally goes all out... do you actually think that subsequent events will be to your liking?

The Mistake Made by All Our Enemies

Step back for a minute and note an important piece of psychohistory -- that every generation of Americans faced adversaries who called us "decadent cowards and pleasure-seeking sybarites (wimps), devoid of any of the virtues of manhood."

Elsewhere, I mark out this pattern, showing how every hostile nation, leader or meme had to invest in this story, for a simple reason. Because Americans were clearly happier, richer, smarter, more successful and far more free than anyone else. Hence, either those darned Yanks must know a better way of living (unthinkable!)... or else they must have traded something for all those surface satisfactions.

Something precious. Like their cojones. Or their souls. A devil's bargain. And hence -- (our adversaries told themselves) -- those pathetic American will fold up, like pansies, as soon as you give them a good push.

It is the one uniform trait shown by every* vicious, obstinate and troglodytic enemy of the American Experiment. A wish fantasy that convinced Hitler and Stalin and the others that urbanized, comfortable New Yorkers and Californians and all the rest cannot possibly have any guts, not like real men. A delusion shared by the King George, the plantation-owners, the Nazis, Soviets and so on, down to Saddam and Osama bin Laden. A delusion that our ancestors disproved time and again, decisively -- though not without a lot of pain

But let's get back to my question for Murdoch and Limbaugh and their puppetmasters. All right, so you are pushing us toward another 1861, betting that we'll tear ourselves to shreds, and that the "red" portion will dominate whatever's left standing.

But do you even remember what happened in 1862? In 1863 and 1864 and 1865?

(A side bet? Ask any of the flagwaving jingo-patriots you know, "Have you ever fantasized about riding with Nathan Bedford Forest?" (Name's unfamiliar? Wiki him and read it all.) My experience, asking that question? A shockingly high percentage of the loudest "patriots" have daydreamed about riding with that brilliant traitor, cutting down their fellow citizens -- both blue and black -- with a whoop and a holler, while screaming damnation at the United States of America. Some patriots.)

Have They Really Thought It Out?

But all right, Rush and Rupert and Sean and Glenn and Tafik. Go ahead. Push hard enough to finally wake up the real United States -- the "Blue America" that seems all mushy because it always tries reason first. The citified sophisticates who have, for generations, sent vast net-flows of their taxes toward the red counties that then bit that generous hand with rants about the "decadent cities..." even though those cities have proved to be more moral, by far. (Compare rates of divorce, domestic violence, teen sex, STDs and yes, even abortion!)

Even though those cities are the front lines in the modern war on terror. Even though it was city folk who proved their courage and resilience, standing up for their country on 9/11.

Remember what finally happened almost a century and a half ago, Rush. Pushed too far, and as a last resort, those "decadent" Americans rose up. They donned that color blue and wore it proudly to defend the Union -- and the dream -- with their very lives.

(And this isn't just regionalist bigotry, speaking. In every state of the Confederacy -- except South Carolina -- regiments of volunteers marched off to wear blue and fight for the country they had given sacred oaths to defend, showing even more courage than boys from Indiana or Maine. Ultimately, it wasn't North vs South, but )

So, Sean and Glenn. Do you have any solid reason to believe things will go differently, this time? That we, the heirs of Fremont and Hancock, are made of lesser stuff? Really? You think so?

Well, you seem determined to find out. So keep pushing. The Union will awaken. It always has. We always will.

Is it Useless To Say Any Of This?

Folks, the truth is, these guys really haven't thought it out.

It's never occurred to them, for example, to ponder the reason why liberals aren't even tepidly trying to pass Gun Control laws, anymore. Because, after eight years of power-grabbing, centralization and abuse by the Bushite Cabal, they came to realize that they might need protection and militia recourse, someday, after all. Especially at a time when their red neighbors are packing away bullets so fast that the factories have to work overtime, while screeching about using violence against their own freely-elected government.

No, Hannity & co haven't thought that out, so wedded are they to the Decadence Assumption. The smugly satisfying but ultimately fatuous notion that wimpy cowardice is all you can expect from anyone with a post-graduate degree. (Tell it to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Tell it to George Marshall.)

Why Do All Fools Think They Are Wise?

And so we have circled back to where we started -- the sad decline of American conservatism into cartoonish idiocy. The puppeteers may be rich. They may be talented provocateurs and con artists... but talent does not equate to brains. Not when the GOP has driven off almost everybody in America who actually knows stuff, including nearly all the scientists, the skilled innovators, and most of the U.S. Officer Corps.

Alas. This is no longer even about "conservatism" anymore. Barry Goldwater lived long enough to denounce what he saw happening to his beloved movement, and things have plummeted even father, since that great man died

Nowadays, bottom-to-top -- and especially at the very top -- it is all about stupidity.

------

----------
* Oh. There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption. Ho Chi Minh never underestimated America. His avowed hero was George Washington and he remained in awe of the U.S., all his life. He remains the only enemy leader who ever defeated us at war, and then only because our hubris (not decadence) got the better of us.

Scientific Failures and Wonders

2009-09-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

See a well-balanced and cogent article in SEED Magazine about the “METI imbroglio”... or whether we should allow a few fervent believers shout into the cosmos on all our behalf, based upon a narrow range of highly dubious assumptions. The fairminded essay cites yours truly, among others.

I’m also briefly interviewed about SETI at the Science and Reigion Today site.

For those of you teaching or taking courses on “contemporary issues”... See - hot off the presses -
Changing Minds: Arguments on Contemporary and Enduring Issues. Jon Ford and Marjorie Ford eds., Penguin Academics Series (2009) My chapter is on the future of surveillance.

“Into God” - The Upcoming Closer To Truth Feature Film, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn - may be of great interest, featuring interviews with luminary minds.

See a nice blog interview with yours truly.

Here's a video of a discussion on the Singularity, with David Brin, Vernor Vinge, Ben Goertzel, Jamais Cascio, Frederick Turner and others...

Ahem. I had an imbroglio with a minor (and somewhat new-agey) science journal -- The “Journal of Cosmology” after they first commissioned from me, and then rejected (amid childish editorial rage), a peer review of an amateur scientist’s paper on panspermia. That is the hypothesis, most-famously put forward a century ago by Nobelist Svanta Arrhenius, suggesting that all life on Earth descends from seed/spores that crossed interstellar space to land in our planet’s early seas. After some hours of work -- courteously decrypting, appraising and discussing this paper -- offering both compliments and refuting evidence -- I was stunned by the editor’s response of actinic, unreasoning fury, based upon grievances that were wholly hallucinatory, bearing no relation, whatsoever, to anything that I actually said in my review. I’ll not waste any further space here in this unpleasantness, though my review is posted on George Dvorsky’s SENTIENT DEVELOPMENTS site, because of George’s intense interest in life origins.

ECCOS OF ADVENTURES PAST...

How cool is this? You may recall that I wrote the storyline, scenario and opening sequence to the famous Dreamcast game (now on the Playstation 2!)... ECCO THE DOLPHIN II: DEFENDER OF THE FUTURE. Now it turns out that someone (in Germany) has posted on YouTube not only the opening sequence, but also the interlude sections, telling additional bits of storyline, after the player achieves each major goal. Sure, the ten year old animation now looks a little crude. But it was state-of-the art in its time and is still quite beautiful. And the voice-over by one of the greatest of all Doctor Who actors doesn't hurt.

See an insightful interview with Pete Garrison, strategic thinker and fiend of SIGMA (The think tank of science fiction authors) in the new Indian SF Magazine, KALKION.

When America expires, we probably won't agree on the cause of death. For proof that autopsies of empires are inconclusive, consider the case of Alexander Demandt, the German historian who set out in the 1980s to collect . The final tally: 210, including attacks by nomads on horseback, blood poisoning, decline of Nordic character, homosexuality, outflow of gold, and vaingloriousness." from How Is America Going To End? Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States.By Josh Levin. Unfortunately, it’s a bit fluffy. I get a bit more serious in my tabulation, in the forthcoming blockbuster novel, EXISTENCE.

APPALLING

Hey, I’ve had my differences with the “New Atheists” like Dennett and Hitchens and Dawkins, who just don’t seem to get how immature and stunningly ironic their wrathful pulpit-pounding makes them look. Nevertheless, a calmer and less dogmatically self righteous version of their militant confrontationalism toward fundie fanatics seems wholly appropos. Now dig this: ”On Thursday November 19, 2009, Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort (the banana guy) will be distributing 50,000 copies of Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species' at universities across America to students for free. BUT THERE'S A CATCH!! Each copy will have a 50 page intro about how evolution has never been proven and how Darwin helped inspire the Holocaust.”

The noive of doze guys! The Nazis burned Darwin’s Origin of Species! The fundies’ insane position, that secularism leads to reduced compassion and morality and thus to increased violence runs diametrically opposite to every fact about the last 4,000 years. And especially the last fifty. If you rightfully classify both Communism and Nazism as quasi-religious mystical cults, then Dawkins et. al. are perfectly within their rights to claim that many parts of organized religion have been major drivers of human agression and pain. Certainly, as we’ve seen, Red America has nothing to say to Blue America about morality, or teaching children to lead decent, responsible and ethical lives, since they fall far behind blue states and our cities in every moral category that can be measured by statistics, from divorce to domestic violence to homicide to STDs and teen pregnancy. A certain amount of militant rejection of such BS is called for.

On the other hand, the New Atheists are self-righteousness druggies without a lick of sense among them. They need to be reminded who brought them to the Enlightenment party! Franklin and Jefferson and Washington and Madison & co. turned civilization toward this wondrous, free and scientific civilization, and those fellows were nearly all either Freemasons or dogma-hating but hyper-tolerant deists. The original Boy Scouts.

Whatever “opiate” it was that they were taking is precisely what we all need, right now.

SCIENCE & COOLSTUFF

I am a total sucker for bridges. Some even make me cry. Really. Literally. I think they rank up there, among the best things in the universe. Now see one of the most beautiful bridges ever created. The O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Bridge across the Colorado River 1,600 feet (490 m) downstream from the Hoover Dam. The entire project is expected to be completed by September 2010.

Cost?
About $240 million.
Having something this beautiful to show aliens, so they’ll decide we are worth something, after all?
Priceless.

Oh, this, too, is Cool! http://planetary.org/blog/article/00002104/

Prenatal exposure to environmental pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can adversely affect a child's intelligence quotient or IQ, according to new research.

MORE ITEMS:

A (somewhat) amusing satire of cheap sci fi novel plot cheats.

This satire represents something that (in a very different form) ought to happen.

Flying with excess baggage is a drag, but hummingbirds have mastered efficient packing. The tiny hoverers have less DNA in their cells than any other previously studied birds, reptiles or mammals, researchers report. Among hummingbird species, however, genome size doesn’t vary along with body size, suggesting that birds’ DNA was pared down before the diversification of today’s hummers. Scientists have long noted the link between small genome size and high metabolic rates — a notion first put forth in 1970 by Polish scientist Henryk Szarski. Bats and birds have the smallest genomes of backboned creatures, and flightless birds tend to have bigger genomes than fliers.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He’s also been writing some terrific think-SF. Highly recommended mind-food. Especially the first one. (Though, to see one place where he might have got the main idea, go to my essay on altruism in the universe, an early version, posted some years ago. Especially the part about intelligent bears, sacralizing infanticide... hm.;-)

Science-program producer Thomas Lucas has developed a new series of shows that breaks completely away from TV, into delivery via YouTube. Have a look at Cosmic Journeys.

Terrrific blog on Wired.com, by “Geek Dad.”

Fascinating -- why winter-born babies seem to have statistically more likelihood to have problems. Surprising reason.

Claims of magnetic monopoles have circulated for years. Here’s the latest.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom. Winston the pigeon took one hour and eight minutes to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Very interesting article about memresistors. Seriously.

AND FINALLY, SOME MORE TIDBITS...

http://www.myexperiment.org/
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23354/page1/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090915174455.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914172644.htm

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17568
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nadir_of_western_civilization_to?utm_source=a-section

More... anon....

And now... loons of the left prove that it isn't a monopoly

2009-09-17T16:47:00.000-07:00

All right then, you've been warned to expect some of my trademarked "contrariness," this time. A tendency -- call it a compulsion -- to always turn and point in some unexpected direction, especially if I have been looking one way for too long. It drives everything from my chosen profession to science to politics.

And yes, today I plan to take a break from decrypting the political madness of the far-right and instead point my j'accuse finger to the left.

But first, do not even begin to interpret what I am about to say as "both sides are equally crazy." Anyone who read my previous missives can tell which direction I condemn most harshly, as the core of madness and outright treason in American life. I've spoken at length about the rightwing cult that has taken over the conservative movement, sending poor Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave and betraying America by sending our great nation into debilitating "culture war." It is still monstrous and unbelievable that Rupert Murdoch and his co-conspirators can get away with posing as populists, while pursuing oligarchic takeover of the country. Without any doubt, that is the direction from which civilization and the American Republic face their greatest danger.

Anyone who doubts the tenacity with which I've fought this fight should have a glance at any of the following extended (and, I'm told, influential) missives:
http://www.davidbrin.com/neoromantics.htm
http://www.davidbrin.com/neocons.htm
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2007/09/real-bush-war-neocons-vs-us-military.html

Nevertheless, I have also made clear my utter contempt for those who simply choose one of the major ideological cults and thereafter march in uncritical lockstep. People who pronounce themselves proud individualists, but then turn their suspicion of authority reflexes in only one direction.

Yes, the right is presently far more noxious and dangerous, having allowed their entire movement to be taken over by monsters. But Lefties who forget Stalin and Mao are intellectually as bankrupt as righties who ignore 4,000 years of oppression by kings and lords and preisthoods.

In fact, nearly all ideologues can be categorized together by a set of sharedpersonality traits that run deeper than their differences of surface policy. Far-lefties and far-righties both partake, for example, in a near-universal propensity for dismissing civil society as futile.

Contempt for the masses is the common steam that rises from every pore, as they preen over things that they "know" that "the majority is too blind to see."

(Am I unaware of the irony of my having typed the previous three paragraphs? Since a majority of my fellow citizens do seem to swallow the abysmal notion of "left-vs'right" - doesn't that make me a masses-contemptuous snob? Har! Hey, I am human too. The difference is that I know this pitfall and have schooled myself to be wary of it. And yes, that is snobbery, too.)

So, as promised, I am going to offer a little balance, this time. To remind us that the left can be as crazy as the right (even while being less dangerous, during THIS decade) go have a look at a horrific piece of preening nonsense that keeps being sent to me by liberals, who think that it is the best thing since spray-on cheese. It's called Sheeple of Amerika.

Feh! Gawd, this thing is a calumny, on so many levels that I am tempted to call it deliberate psychological warfare against the Enlightenment. Perhaps one of Murdoch's put-up provocations, crafted precisely in order to undermine liberal credibility.

Look, no one can teach me a thing about rambunctious contrarianism and suspicion of authority.

But think. What is the most pervasive and relentless "propaganda" campaign in the history of the world?

When asked this question, people name all sorts of messages that they perceive as responsible for turning the masses into contemptible sheep. Lefties point to pervasive "buy this" consumerism. Rightists screech over the other side's incessant demands for conformist political correctness. What's never mentioned is the propaganda that actually worked... on them! If you asked these guys for a week, a year, and even if their lives depended on it, they would never guess.

Surprise, surprise. We are self-flatterers and so we never attribute OUR favorite traits to propaganda that filled our very pores, from a young age. But there's a pair of messages that inarguably and statistically outnumber both "buy this" and Tolerance Fetishism, combined.

We all grew up suckling Suspicion of Authority (SOA) combined with "I'm a F4$#$@king individual and everybody else are lemmings!"

You see these twin themes conveyed in nearly every film, most of which also portray civilization itself (and its institutions) as utterly hopeless. Usually evil. With some central/awful authority being bravely opposed by one -- or a few -- stalwart individualist heroes who don't need no institutions to stand between them and justice!

Think about it. List the themes in nearly every Hollywood product. Name any messages that occur more often than this pair. But people never notice the propaganda that made THEM the way they are. Now add in the most alluring theme of all. Yes, our old pal contempt for the masses. Go ahead and TEST YOURSELF.

So, will Brin ever get to the point? How does all of this apply to "Sheeple"?

Let's be frank. THE message of this 'film' is not urging folks to wake up, or fomenting rebellion; it is contempt. Feeding the producers' sanctimonious sense that they are privileged and smarter and more insightful than their sheeplike neighbors, like gods above mere animals. Self-flattery is the cheapest drug around. Any addict can get all he wants, and these guys have it hard. http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.htm

But it gets worse. For, you see, it's been shown that the surest way to get the masses under control is NOT to inculcate worshipful passivity, but rather to spread a dull, simmering state of generalized resentment, aimed in all directions and at each other.

What? You've never studied Machiavelli? Really? What do you think "culture war" is all about? The whole "populist" theme driving Red America to hate the cities and anyone with a graduate degree?

The formula is simple. Inundate the prols with distractions that scatter their SOA in every direction. And if some of those directions are "up" toward some corporations and meeting groups of the rich? So what? So long as you shotgun a vast number of targets, you'll keep it scattered. Impotent. (Notice though, the Sheeple guys never mention Rupert Murdoch or the petroprinces who have been doing the most meddling of all. Gee I wonder why.)

And so, the ultimate irony. This is exactly the sort of thing that the masters would want produced!

Do I seriously believe that "Sheeple" was generated at the AEI or Heritage or some other Murdochian pimphouse? Naw. Funny thing is, they probably got it for free, or maybe with the gentlest prodding. This shit is self-stirring.

Note that this film -- after purportedly demanding that people "wake up!" -- doesn't suggest any of the things that might ACTUALLY cause sheep to look up... such as actual, pragmatic links to learned and detailed analyses of world power, for example. Or self-organizing tools. Nor does it recommend the kind of "proxy power" organizations that can empower any individual to join with large numbers of others, in common cause to deal, effectively, with specific, targeted issues.

They can't offer such suggestions! Because that would be to admit that the sheep can and do self-organize, effectively, and we must never admit that! So, instead, "Sheeple" jumbles a huge goulash. Mixing genuinely worrisome trends, like rising income gaps, with vapid idiocies like 9/11 "loose change" conspiracies and UFO cults. That's right, keep the paranoia spread evenly, guys. It's what you're subsidized to do.

Oh, maybe a third of the slides do point to genuine problems that deserve attention, problem-solving appraisal, or even criminal prosecution. So? A two-second flicker and each issue joins the jumble of true, false, misleading and just plain stupid.

Is the greedy patenting of seed strains and eliminating self-fertility, so that farmers cannot re-seed their fields, evil? Sure! Is Genetic Modification of food crops automatically a crime against people and nature? Bullshit! That's pure luddite sanctimonious unscientific claptrap and the surest sign of dullard minds, while every single bite of food they eat was genetically modified by previous generations of farmers and breeders. Have these guys helped us to intelligently parse the good parts of a techno future from the bad? Hah!

If you actually and really want to pragmatically fight evil, promote justice, save the world and advance the Enlightenment, there's a proved method. One that bypasses all this contempt-for-the-masses malarkey and goes straight to problem solving -- combining the tiny influence of individuals into the momentum of millions. Drop by the PROXY POWER site.

It will tell you how to do exactly that.

Oog, these guys got me exercised. And sure, I expect to be derided as a tool of corporate interests, just for criticizing their lobotomized (or else corporate sponsored) uselessness. But note that I never claimed that they weren't pointing to some genuine enemies of humanity and the world. As I said, about a third of the slides were completely or partially right-on!

But they aren't helpful. Not at any level. As elistists, on a sanctimony drug-high, they are proof that the left contains crazies, too.* They are part of the problem. The REAL problem -- the insanity of culture war.

We won't defeat the Rush Limbaughs by acting just like them. We'll defeat them by being the grownups.

DB

* Reiterating the central point, yet again. The liberal and conservative movements ARE fundamentally different, today. Both contain some good ideas, deepdown. Both contain some crazies. The crucial distinction is that one of these movements keeps its lunatics marginalized. Its leaders perpetually try -- hit or miss -- to re-awaken the American genius for honorable negotiation and pragmatic problem-solving.

The other side may have some genuine ideas, lying dormant under the snows. But all its potential good has been rendered useless, by giving itself over, body and soul, to its psychopathic wing.

Do not hate American Conservatism. Pity it. Pray for the fever to break and for our fellow citizens to rise out of delirium, to rejoin us at the dinner table conversation about human destiny. And defeat them with reason, until they do.

Judo Politics: a way to get all kids insured

2009-09-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

Intermission note: Before continuing to give my second part -- this time about some craziness on the left -- I want to say this about Health Care

It appears that President Obama may have to retreat from the "public option" in his effort to achieve some Health Care Reform, this year. It may surprise you to learn that I approve of this jiu jitsu move.

What, you think this is the only battle in this fight? The "only chance?" That kind of impatience ruined Hillary's over-reach in 93 and torpedoed her husband's presidency. Pragmatists prefer incrementalism.

I say, let the insurance companies crow over a "victory" that substantially changes the health insurance marketplace for the better, drives competition, but leaves out a government -run system to take up the slack where people cannot get policies by private means.

Why? Because a man as smart as Obama knows that a multi-step judo move works better than one big sumo charge. Once he has his market reforms in place, he can then do something simple, that would undercut the for-profits and really force them to the negotiating table.

Call for a followup bill that simply puts all american children under Medicare.

The reasoning is simple and implacable -- if old people deserve it, so do their equally vulnerable grandchildren.

Put it just that way, starkly and simply. A bill that could go on one page of paper. One that needs no extensive argument or amending. Vote now: Is this a good idea or not? Yea or nay. Most would not dare oppose it.

Remove forty million Americans, in a shot, from the rolls of the for-profits, and you'll get their attention, all right. Next, threaten to raise the cutoff age from 18 to 21... then 25... and watch how quickly they come to the negotiating table.

Ah, judo.

======

Yes, some of you have heard this idea, many times before. But its simplicity bears repeating.

Note: poor kids are already getting government health benefits under SCHIP -- though in a far more complex way. Hence, this change would not be a huge new expense. But it would simplify matters greatly.

Madness of the Right and Left: Part One

2009-09-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

I've been busy trying to write my next novel. But two items online spurred my ire. And so, as "Contrary Brin," I will fairmindedly aim my hot scalpel toward both extremes of the silly, nonsensical "left-right political axis."

Of course we know what the biggest difference is, between liberalism and conservatism, these days. Both movements have their complete, gibbering monsters. Alas, one of these large American movements is now utterly controlled by its fanatical/crazy wing, and I'll start by aiming a harsh screed in that direction. The other movement is luckier; it is still run, overall, by its pragmatic problem solvers -- but that doesn't mean there aren't psychopaths on that side, too! And so, in a day or two, I'll set an example in contrary evenhandedness and shoot down some really horrid lefty flakes.

But first.....

A truly excellent appraisal is given by the meticulous political blogger Russ Daggatt, of how, just in the last week, even "moderates" in the Republican establishment seem to have toppled into bona fide, certifiable, non-compos craziness. None of their "issues" has anything to do with old-fashioned "left-right" any longer, or defending markets or any"conservatism" that Barry Goldwater would even distantly recognize.

Goldwater believed in discourse, in science, in negotiation, persuasion, accountability and adult behavior. Now? With regret, I am willing to call off attempts to restart civilized discourse with "decent conservatives." There don't appear to be any left. Just a pack of these grumpy (and loony) old white men who make clear, by their scorched-Earth approach to politics, that they would rather see America fail than Obama succeed.

Read Daggatt. Devastatingly, he shows this via a dozen cogent points you may not have seen before.

On the other hand, I am also very unhappy with the playbook of the Democrats, who seem to think that they can reason their way out of Culture War.   That has been their neurotic delusion, for a very long time, and it has made them very bad at playing the game.

Look, when you have a relentless and implacable enemy alliance, the trick above all is to break up their coalition. You start by analyzing it for unlikely bedfellows. Blatantly, the right-wing culture war army has three important components:

1) The string-pullers are made up of conniving plutocrats, led by Rupert Murdoch. The only overall winners from the Bush era.

2) The priesthood of the movement -- the Rationalizers -- make up the so-called "libertarian" wing of Republicanism. This segment has dwindled in the face of monumental GOP betrayal of everything that Adam Smith ever stood for -- no-bid crony contracting, arterial deficit spending, meddlesome-jingoistic imperialism, fiscal and financial blundering, stark power-grabs and violations of civil liberties have all left this segment quivering.

Those who can count have noticed that EVERY Supply Side prediction failed and every metric of national health collapsed under GOP rule. Those who can be swayed by facts are already moving on. Leaving two subsets behind... those who are in utter denial, covering their ears and screaming "nah!!"... and those who are whores, in the pay of the New Lords. No, there's little to be gained by trying any longer to reason with this layer.

3) Meanwhile the biggest clade -- those we see screeching at Town Meetings and Tea parties -- are largely white, male, non-urban know-nothings. And they matter -- a lot.   They are as important to the New Lords as poor southern whites were, to plantation aristocrats, during the US Civil War -- ground troops who have to be stoked into a rage, in order to serve the lords' higher interests.   Why else would Fox News push relentlessly the thinly buried message -- to hate half your fellow citizens? Especially anyone with a post-graduate degree?

Do these ground troops ever actually GET anything, from their masters? Across the GOP-led era, not a single agenda item promised to the fundamentalists, or nativists, or gun folk, or any other Deep Red group, was ever delivered. No effective changes in abortion law, no reduction in illegal immigration, no improvement (in fact huge declines) in military readiness. Drops in job security and net income. Oh, it's futile to point any of this out. Murdoch knows the buttons.   Democrats simply cede this swathe to him. They just assume that, in their tens of millions, Red Populists are inherently and irreversibly in the right-wing camp...

...or are they? Might there be a way to turn the boiling rage of group #3 toward group #1? Veering the massive Red Populist movement against the plantation aristocracy? Surely that is the possibility giving the New Lords night-time sweats.

Impossible? Think about it. Murdoch keeps tapping a central theme -- one that is deeply American -- Suspicion of Authority (SOA) -- pushed in every song, legend and Hollywood film. We differ mainly over WHICH group each of us perceives trying to become Big Brother. Some dread corporations and aristocrats. Others -- faceless government bureaucrats and snooty intellectuals. Each of us tends to see only threats from the direction we chose to fixate-on. (Hence, my decision, long ago, to practice omni-directional contrariness!)

So far, Faux News has done a great job stirring Red America to actinic fury at government (even though the GOP ran it for so long) and at urbanites and anyone who actually knows anything. He seems to have the Red Populists all sewn up.

But remember, it wasn't so long ago that working whites fumed against greedy Mr. Potter types! The key question is: What would it take to make that happen again?.

The answer is really simple. A heap of great big scandals, that go farther than what we've seen, so far. Scandals that rub the populists' noses in how thoroughly they have been used by a different powerful group of authoritarians.

This is why I am ticked off at Attorney General Holder, for going after (and alienating) the CIA at a time when Halliburton's betrayal of our troops would make a far juicier target. The sole-source "emergency clause" no-bid contracts that cost our republic billions while stabbing the military in the back. The tax cheats with their offshore secret accounts. The parasites and monopolists, destroying mom & pop business, across the country. The Wall Street vampires. How many more betrayals-up-top can Fox spin? The answer? Keep them busy and let's find out?

The crux: Why has there been almost NO talk of a Special Prosecutor for Recession-causing crimes? Is Goldman-Sachs really that influential in the Obama White House?

Getting back to the overview: do mark my words, Culture War is the greatest overall treason committed against the republic since Secession. Perpetrated in very much the same spirit, with similar goals and methods, while tapping an identical thread in the national psyche. It is a deliberate, manipulative scheme to demolish America's enlightenment methods of deliberated problem solving. It has nothing whatsoever to do with safeguarding markets, capitalism or freedom. Indeed, those things can only survive by defeating it.

This is the fight worth winning, but Democrats seem to be clueless about how to begin. SO it may be up to the rest of us. We should be focusing on how to separate the ground troops from their masters. Divert populism and its ire back toward the enemies who ruined every other renaissance in human history.

I am NOT talking about "class warfare" against the rich. (Though the Murdochians are complete fools, if they think their road will not eventually lead to tumbrels, rolling in the streets. Smart int he short-term, imbecilles in the long.)

No, most of those who are merely wealthy earned it, fair and square. So this is only glancingly about "the rich."

I am talking about those who want to resume the ancient art of feudalism.

Find a way to waken Red America to that danger, and we may yet win back our brothers and sisters in fellow citizenship and common cause. In the only Revolution that ever changed humanity for the better.

Land of the Lost

2009-08-18T21:24:00.000-07:00

I am going to break with my typical "bad blogging" habits... my penchant for writing long, carefully edited and punctiliously argued screeds dealing with serious topics (everyone says that is NOT the way to blog!)...

...and instead issue a short, ill-edited rant on popular culture.
(Ah! Now Brin is catching on top what the Internet is FOR!)

The topic? That infuriating television show LOST.

I'm going to list the inconsistencies and frustrations that most vex me in this series. They are probably not the same as what you'll read at, say, one of the fan sites, because I view it through the lens of a professional plot-smith.

First, I do try to view art in the spirit that it is offered -- and I know that the writers and producers of LOST are engaged in the art form known as the Grand Tease. Hence I won't complain about the fundamental premise -- that no character ever asks any crucial questions, not even when they had the leisure of 3 years to ask them. No, that is a central theme of the series and anyone who can't abide it simply should not watch.

But some things were revealed and made explicit. earlier. They should have been kept in mind as the series developed. They were huge clues. They deserved payoff. And, although some may seem minor, ignoring them should be cause for the producers to be (figuratively) shot!

1) The children and stewardesses etc of the crashed Oceanic flight. They were taken away by the Others. Dozens of them We even glimpsed them, near the Polar Bear cages, in one episode. A major plot element, they are now (in show-year 2006) the main group of survivors left. Above all they are the only true INNOCENTS left, and hence the ones who deserve any loyalty or attention or moral duty in the story.

2) Plot elements left hanging: The "disease"... the mysterious lethality of childbirth... the SOURCE of the "others" -- who apparently were recruited by "a magnificent man..." the deGroots and Hanso and their goals...

3) The air drop of Dharma supplies. Yes, when the Oceanic survivors found parachuted supplies meant for the last Dharma outpost in the Hatch... sure it only happened once , but the implications were HUGE! It meant that there was still a Dharma initiative out there! It implied another route to the island than by submarine. Did it bother ANYBODY else out there? It ought to.

4) Heck, what happened to the Dharma and the guys backing them and the group in Ann Arbor? Did they learn ANYTHING after all that expense and effort?

An side -- what IS it with the obsession in all TV series, of leaving contemporary society unchanged? STARGATE was a great show, but their excuses for NOT FREAKING TELLING THE WORLD that Earth was fast becoming an intergalactic imperial power started getting really, really lame. Would it have hurt to show what WE might have done, reacting to such news?*

5) There is only one character in the tale who is not relentlessly clueless and stupid. The one character who is always, always right. Hurley. The writers always show him suggesting openness and wisdom, and getting contemptuously, patronizingly spurned by his friends. He's the only one who wanted simply to tell the world about the island! And thus... render all sides in the silly "war" moot and let all humanity learn all about something miraculous that we could all share.

Is Hurley EVER going to be listened-to?

6) What the $%#! have all the governments of the world been doing, all this time? Not ONE person, anywhere or anytime, ever told any responsible group of adults about all the shenanigens going on, with incredible powers? Sure, it's more dramatic to leave the government out of it. That is... unless a pair of FBI agents - looking suspiciously like Mulder and Sculley - were to arrive and speak out for telling the world....

6) Death guilt. There were hints, throughout the first two seasons, that you were either chosen by the Others - or not - depending on whether you had killed somebody or done something else that caused you to feel guilty. Jack and Hurley felt INDIRECTLY guilty, and so we left on the beach. Locke at the time had no guilt and I thought that was his reason for being "chosen". He even avoided "re-killing" his own father...

...that is, till he outright committed unprovoked MURDER by hurling a knife into the back of an innocent woman. Wha???? HAve the writers forgotten all about that thread? When Ethan told the murderer female cop "you're not worthy" they made this point very clear! Only, then they show the Others committing murder like crazy! So, WTF?

7) Speaking of Locke's father... wasn't he taken out of a "magic box" by Benjamin Linus? What ever happened to that?

Okay okay... I should have just turned off the damned box, a couple of years ago. The last season is already filmed (though a few minutes of spliced in conversation is still possible). Maybe we are best served simply by boycotting the final season, to teach a lesson to Abrams and others like him, who do not care about fealty to plot.

====

* I'll go see DISTRICT 9 soon. I hear good things. Still, I think the same concept, done in the 1980s, was intrinsically more courageous. Rent ALIEN NATION and see how that brave film did something no other ever even tried -- either before or since. It portrayed our civilization -- and its citizens -- actually behaving as they might, if such things ever happened for real.

In other words... a majority of us actually trying to behave decently and well, with tolerance and courage and smarts and a will to face the future.

Hollywood, it seems, not only cannot ever portray such things... people there cannot even seem to wrap their minds around the idea! Hence, alas, we come full circle to poor Hurley.

He represents the rest of us. The ones with more brains and heart than movie star looks. The poor schlumps with common sense.

====

BTW... enjoy http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html

The Real Way to Feel Safe with Artificial Intelligence

2009-08-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry to have posted so little, of late. We have been ensnared by a huge and complex Eagle Scout Project here... plus another kid making Black Belt, and yet another at Screenwriting camp... then the first one showing me endless online photos of "cars it would be cool to buy..."

And so, clearing my deck of topics to rant about, I'd like to post quickly this rumination on giving rights to artificial intelligences. Bruce Sterling has lately raised this perennial issue, as did Mike Treder in an excellent piece suggesting that our initial attitudes toward such creatures may color the entire outcome of a purported "technological singularity."

The Real Reason to Ensure AI Rights

No issue is of greater importance than ensuring that our new, quasi-intelligent creations are raised properly. While oversimplifying terribly, Hollywood visions of future machine intelligence range from TERMINATOR-like madness to admirable traits portrayed in movies like AI or in the BICENTENNIAL MAN.

I've spoken elsewhere of one great irony -- that there is nothing new about this endeavor. That every human generation embarks upon a similar exercise -- creating new entities that start out less intelligent and virtually helpless, but gradually transform into beings that are stronger, more capable, and sometimes more brilliant than their parents can imagine.

The difference between this older style of parenthood and the New Creation is not only that we are attempting to do all of the design de novo, with very little help from nature or evolution, but also that the pace is speeding up. It may even accelerate, once semi-intelligent computers assist in fashioning new and better successors.

Humanity is used to the older method, in which each next generation reliably includes many who rise up, better than their ancestors... while many others sink lower, even into depravity. It all sort of balanced out (amid great pain), but henceforth we cannot afford such haphazard ratios, from either our traditional-organic heirs or their cybernetic creche-mates.

I agree that our near-future politics and social norms will powerfully affect what kind of "singularity" transformation we'll get -- ranging from the dismal fears of Bill Joy and Ted Kaczynski to the fizzing fantasies of Ray Kurzweil. But first, let me say it's not the surface politics of our useless, almost-meaningless so-called Left-vs-Right axis. Nor will it be primarily a matter of allocation of taxed resources. Except for investments in science and education and infrastructure, those are not where the main action will be. They will not determine the difference between "good" and "bad" transcendence. Between THE MATRIX and, say, FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH.

No, what I figure will be the determining issue is this. Shall we maintain momentum and fealty to the underlying concepts of the Western Enlightenment? Concepts that run even deeper than democracy or the principle of equal rights, because they form the underlying, pragmatic basis for our entire renaissance.

Going With What Has Already Worked

These are, I believe, the pillars of our civilization -- the reasons that we have accomplished so much more than any other, and why we may even succeed in doing it right, when we create Neo-Humanity.

1. We acknowledge that individual human beings -- and also, presumably, the expected caste of neo-humans -- are inherently flawed in their subjectively biased views of the world.

In other words... we are all delusional! Even the very best of us. Even (despite all their protestations to the contrary) all leaders. And even (especially) those of you out there who believe that you have it all sussed.

This is crucial. Six thousand years of history show this to be the one towering fact of human nature. Our combination of delusion and denial is the core predicament that stymied our creative, problem-solving abilities, delaying the great flowering that we're now part-of.

These dismal traits still erupt everywhere, in all of us. Moreover, it is especially important to assume that delusion and denial will arise, inevitably, in the new intelligent entities that we're about to create. If we are wise parents, we will teach them to say what all good scientists are schooled to say, repeatedly: "I might be mistaken." But that, alone, is not enough.

2. There is a solution to this curse, but it is not at all the one what was recommended by Plato, or any of the other great sages of the past.

Oh, they knew all about about the delusion problem, of course. See Plato's "allegory of the cave," or the sayings of Buddha, or any of a myriad other sage critiques of fallible human subjectivity. These savants were correct to point at the core problem... only then, each of them claimed that it could be solved by following their exact prescription for Right Thinking. And followers bought in, reciting or following the incantations and flattering themselves that they had a path that freed them of error.

Painfully, at great cost, we have learned that there is no such prescription. Alack, the net sum of "wisdom" that those prophets all offered only wound up fostering even more delusion. It turns out that nothing -- no method or palliative applied by a single human mind, upon itself -- will ever accomplish the objective.

Oh, sure, logic and reason and sound habits of scientifically-informed self-doubt can help a lot. They may cut the error rate in half, or even by a factor of a hundred! Nevertheless, you and I are still delusional twits. We always will be! It is inherent. Live with it. Our ancestors had to live with the consequences of this inherent human curse.

Ah, but things turned out not to be hopeless, after all! For, eventually, the Enlightenment offered a completely different way to deal with this perennial dilemma. We (and presumably our neo-human creations) can be forced to notice, acknowledge, and sometimes even correct our favorite delusions, through one trick that lies at the heart of every Enlightenment innovation -- the processes called Reciprocal Accountability (RA).

In order to overcome denial and delusion, the Enlightenment tried something unprecedented -- doing without the gurus and sages and kings and priests. Instead, it nurtured competitive systems in markets, democracy, science and courts, through which back and forth criticism is encouraged to flow, detecting many errors and allowing many innovations to improve. Oh, competition isn't everything! Cooperation and generosity and ideals are clearly important parts of the process, too. But ingrained reciprocality of criticism -- inescapable by any leader -- is the core innovation.

3. These systems -- including "checks and balances" exemplified in the U.S. Constitution -- help to prevent the kind of sole-sourcing of power, not only by old-fashioned human tyrants, but also the kind of oppression that we all fear might happen, if the Singularity were to run away, controlled by just one or a few mega-machine-minds. The nightmare scenarios portrayed in The Matrix, Terminator, or the Asimov universe.

The Way to Ensure AI is Both Sane and Wise

How can we ever feel safe, in a near future dominated by powerful artificial intelligences that far outstrip our own? What force or power could possibly keep such a being, or beings, accountable?

Um, by now, isn't it obvious?

The most reassuring thing that could happen would be for us mere legacy/organic humans to peer upward and see a great diversity of mega minds, contending with each other, politely, and under civil rules, but vigorously nonetheless, holding each other to account and ensuring everything is above-board.

This outcome -- almost never portrayed in fiction -- would strike us as inherently more likely to be safe and successful. After all, isn't it today's situation? The vast majority of citizens do not understand arcane matters of science or policy or finance. They watch the wrangling among alphas and are reassured to see them applying accountability upon each other.... a reassurance that was betrayed by recent attempts to draw clouds of secrecy across all of our deliberative processes.

Sure, it is profoundly imperfect, and fickle citizens can be swayed by mogul-controlled media to apply their votes in unwise directions. We sigh and shake our heads... as future AI Leaders will moan in near-despair over organic-human sovereignty. But, if they are truly wise, they'll continue this compact. Because the most far-seeing among them will recognize that "I might be wrong" is still the greatest thing than any mind can say. And that we reciprocal criticism is even better.

Alas, even those who want to keep our values strong, heading into the Singularity Age, seldom parse it down to this fundamental level. They talk - for example - about giving AI "rights" in purely moral terms... or perhaps to placate them and prevent them from rebelling and squashing us.

But the real reason to do this is far more pragmatic. If the new AIs feel vested in a civilization that considers them "human" then they may engage in our give and take process of shining light upon delusion. Each others delusions, above all.

Reciprocal accountability -- extrapolated to a higher level -- may thus maintain the core innovation of our civilization. It's central and vital insight.

And thus, we may find that our new leaders -- our godlike grandchildren -- will still care about us... and keep trying to explain.

-

The notion of disputation arenas

2009-07-29T12:05:00.000-07:00

Over in the closed discussion group of the Lifeboat Foundation, there's been discussion of the concept of "Disputation Arenas." Or the notion that the art of argument badly needs an upgrade for modern times.

Back during the middle ages, there were occasional attempts to bring together the wisest members of disparate, bickering factions in order to hear out both sides. The most famous of these disputations involved Catholic prelates vs prominent Rabbis and they were anything but fair - always aimed at a foregone conclusion. Yet, the rabbis came, nonetheless. Why? Because a little bit of light, in the darkness, is better than none at all.

And so, as the fellow who coined the term "Disputation Arenas," I have decided to post my response to the Lifeboat group here, for public tasting...

(For detailed background, see the lead article in the American Bar Association' s Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit."

---------------------

Regarding the basic notion behind Disputation Arenas...

...I never envisioned a single forum where "truth" would be decided. rather, the notion was simply to empower Already-existing enlightenment processes to do better at their task of pragmatic problem-solving. One of the core elements of the Enlightenment, after all, is argument... the harnessing of inter-human competition toward the discovery of both errors and increasingly more effective models of the world.

An aside -- while I deeply respect my pal Robin Hanson for his lively mind and far-reaching intellect, I never did understand his argument (with which I disagree) that disagreement, in itself, is inherently flawed and not solvable by argument. (Alliteration is intentional. )

Rather, what seems inherent is our human propensity -- nay, genius -- at self-delusion. It is the core human quandary and one that puts the kiabosh on all platonic notions of rule by simple reason. The very best of us fall for delusions -- and moreover, we have no clear way of determining which of us is "the best of us." The one method by which human beings can reliably be made aware of their delusions is through interaction with others -- (a crucial point that we need to make clear to burgeoning artificial intelligences! )

YOU are capable of noticing the delusions that I am too in-love-with to spot or correct. In pointing them out, you do me the service of reciprocal accountability (RA) -- or criticism -- a great boon, allowing self-improvement, and a boon which I'll be only too happy to serve back to you, in plenty. As a favor, of course.

The irony -- that competition thus overcomes our resistance to criticism, and thus fosters a form of (involuntary) cooperation -- is rich and thick and delicious as cake.

(As ironic as the fact that the most vociferous "defenders of competitive markets" are all-too often those who do not get it, and strive always to harm the core process. And yes, Cato Institute, I am talking about you.)

(See how all this fits into the Big Picture . Those with immense patience and stamina might even try my way-over-caffienated (but entertaining) talk at Google about "Discourse and Problem Solving in the 21st Century!")

Am I suggesting that Twitter and Second Life and Facebook are helping to lobotomize us, at a time when we really need technologies that might help bring out our best and most mature problem-solving skills? Well, yes, though I am not invested in pessimism, like Bill Joy or Nicholas Carr. I feel that these "attention spreading" systems might have some positive effects (perhaps even 1% as much as zealots like Clay Shirky envision!) But only if they are augmented by other methodologies - mostly not invented yet - that also help us to rediscover focus.

The crux point is that current fads and trends DO enhance self-expression, vastly, but they also make it trivial to avoid criticism... or, rather, to avoid having to note or notice or respond to or perform self-modification as a result of criticism. Those who praise ONLY vastly-enhanced self-expression, while ignoring the other half of the Creative Cycle, may be very bright, but they are being zealous fools.

Parse this carefully. The pessimist curmugeons urge us to step back from the cliff of lobotomization-by-technology, by renouncing some of them and restoring older ways -- a method that never, ever worked in the past.

Meanwhile, the fervid optimists cry out hossanahs to Twitter.

Both sides are silly. To guys like me, who are skeptical of every broad-brush generalization, who love technology but want it to empower pragmatic problem-solvers, it is clear what's missing. And, yes, the solution is more technology... only much better balanced technology.

Hence - getting back on-topic - the key features of any Disputation Area system must not only include excellent tools for argument-management , position-parsing, analytic tools and all that. It must also address to problem of how to get people (or advocacy groups) to come! And how to encourage an environment where ALL participants have to grudgingly acknowledge "Hm... I guess I need to take that into account."

Note that that is PRECISELY what happens in the four existing "accountability arenas"... markets, democracy, courts, and especially science. In the first two, it is filthy and inefficient, but also glorious, compared to all past, delusion-drenched civilizations. So, what I am asking for is not impossible.

It would, however, require some focus... and money... to implement. I can think of no more valuable thing for a billionaire to sponsor. But, then, I am not a billionaire and the delusion that I can tell billionaires what to do is... well, a rich one that's been subject to the criticism of life experience.

david brin

(Join a discussion of this issue.)

===

ADDENDUM
See a fascinating appraisal of the way that Amazon recently sent fingers into every Kindle device that had George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on it, removed the book and refunded the purchase price, without notification -- an act with ironic resonance in many ways.

The author goes on to offer some interesting comparisons of Kindle to the eReader. What fascinates me is the extent to which we have allowed the new media to eliminate the freedoms that we had, in the time of videotape, audio cassettes and early computer disks. True, copyright piracy is (generally) bad. But the bloody inconvenience and blithering incomprehensibility of simply using a modern DVD player to watch a film that you already own - let alone record an episode of NOVA - it is why I keep three VCRs in the house, still.

Online events and other coolstuff

2009-07-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

My brief essay in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the firsr moon landing is now up on Tor.com. A surprising perspective on art, ambition and the problem of ennui

My recent talk for the USENIX Conference is available for viewing online. A bit nerdier than my usual speeches about the future, for more general audiences. This bunch of technies seemed to really get into it! So I went a little long.

H+ asked David Brin, Ben Goertzel, J. Storrs Hall, Vernor Vinge, and others: "Is a Terminator-like scenario possible? And if so, how likely is it?" Extrapolation! Peering into tomorrow! What fun.

Here’s the latest compilation of my Five Star Rated You Tube appearances.

COOL QUICKIES

A fascinating look at how your native language alters the way that you think.

See a terrific (and sfnally philosophical) comic strip Dresden Codak.

"Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future" is co-authored by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, and is now available in stores across the country and online.

Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher I’ve had some cool exchanges with, has brought to life -- partly at Bill Gates’s encouragement -- “project Tuva,” which will now bring you some of the greates, inspirational physics lectures of Richard Feynman. (Remind me, some time, to tell you some of my own stries about the man, how Feynmen once stole my date at a dance... well, for a while... and how he tricked me into becoming (alas) a physics major.)

FASCINATING

Researchers report that rapamycin, a compound first discovered in soil of Easter Island, extended the expected lifespan of middle-aged mice by 28 percent to 38 percent. In human terms, this would be greater than the predicted increase in extra years of life if cancer and heart disease were both cured and prevented. (BTW “rapa” comes from Rapanui, the island’s real name. See EARTH>) (Thanks Stefan.)

Monkeys that consumed 30 percent less calories than average peers were one third as likely to get a age-related disease and were likely to live longer. Yeah yeah... I have heard it all before. So why do we so almost ZERO sign of such an effect in humans? (Putting aside obesity, of course.) After 4,000 years, we’d know if ascetic monks lived longer, by now.

In fact, everybody has it bass-ackwards! Semi starvation triggers switches in mammals that say “delay your programmed burnout in case better times may give you a better chance to breed.” But it doesn’t happen in humans - because we have ALREADY thrown all those switches! Our lifespans are already HUGE for mammals. We get three times as many heartbeats. Because for a million years it benefited tribes to have some elders around as repositories of lore. Result? We are already picking all the low-hanging longevity fruit. In the case of humans, further increases are gonna need some real sophisticated intervention.

Funny thing. Not a single researcher in this topic has (to my knowledge) posited this “thrown switches” way of looking at things. My theory is actually a hybrid of the two big models of ageing -- that it is programmed-in vs that it is an accumulation of genertic and organc errors. What I am saying is that it is clearly programmed in, for all mammalian species EXCEPT humans, who have already pegged and maxed-out all the dials. For us, ageing really is about accumulated errors and running out of steam. Which means that animal analogues and models are of very limited utility.

Watch this one to figure out the joke. Be sure to watch it to the "end"...as the stewardess walks away.

Does the Moon Beckon Us Back?

2009-07-17T12:41:00.001-07:00

As the father of three teenagers, I share with millions of other boomers a head-scratching perplexity. Why don’t today’s youth care about outer space?

The easy answer would be to seize upon a simple nostrum -- about each era rejecting the obsessions of the one before it. But then, in that case, why is the very opposite true about popular music? Back in the hippie era, music divided the generations. But today? Well, my kids adore classic 60s and 70s Rock. In a surf shop or bike store, all I have to do is mention a few of the concerts that I snuck into, long ago, and the brash young fellers are at my feet, saying “tell us more, gramps!”

So why do they yawn, when we turn to the NASA Channel or tape the latest shuttle launch to show them after dinner, or when we talk about colonizing Mars?

Or when we brag about being members of a species who walked on the Moon? For certain, you don’t hear astronaut mentioned on any list of dream jobs.

Puzzling over this quandary, I was reminded of something Norman Mailer said, when he wrote his 1960s tome SPACE. Mailer had begun researching the book amid feelings of smug, intellectual hostility toward the crewcut engineers and fliers he encountered... only then his attitude shifted when he realized, in a startled epiphany that: “They were achieving not one, but two bona fide miracles.”

Feats that -- when Mailer really thought about it -- struck him as truly Biblical in proportion.

1. They were actually going to the Moon!

2. They were actually succeeding in making such an adventure boring.

Mailer’s insight came to mind, while I was talking to my kids about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Of all the predictions* ever made about spaceflight, I figure the least imaginable outcome would have been ennui.

*(Speaking of predictions. In a 1959 comic strip Jeff Hawke, the writers forecast that the first human landing on the Moon would happen on 4 August 1969, missing the real-life date by only two weeks.

Of course, policy has had a lot to do with it. Members of the astronaut corps were always willing to accept a level of calculated risk similar to -- if more carefully managed than -- the adventurous pioneers of aviation. Perhaps the public might also have accepted the kind of casualty rates that usually occur on a frontier -- they did in Lindbergh’s time. But politicians could not. They wanted promises of “routine access to space.” And so, the shuttle proved an expensive and awkward mix of overblown promises, lost opportunities, relentless nit-pickery and mind numbing sameness. Not at all what we expected, back when my peers sat in dazed wonder, in the front row, watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Nor is that entirely a bad thing. As I point out elsewhere, we may have failed to build magnificent, rolling space hotels and moonbases that frolic to Strauss waltzes. But our civilization is a better one, than was depicted in that film. And if I had to choose...

Now consider a few other perspectives. For example: ever since the invention of the steam locomotive, human beings (or their machines) managed, every passing year and decade, to keep traveling faster at an accelerating rate -- a curve that kept spiking ever more vertical, until we launched the Voyager space probes on their pellmell fling past Jupiter and beyond the Solar System, in the mid 1970s. Extrapolating that curve of ever-greater speed, some expected that we would, by 2010, dispatch probes to distant stars! We might easily have landed humans on Mars, using Freeman Dyson’s marvelous Orion-drive ships. It all appeared as inevitable and obvious as Moore’s Law of computer development seems to a different generation of techie-transcendentalists.

Only then, quite suddenly, the curve of acceleration abruptly stopped -- after 150 years. The Voyagers still represent, in many ways, a high water mark of humanity’s progress in space, culminating and concluding our raucous search for speed. At least, for now.

Indeed, millions now look at the Space Race obsession as a mark of earlier immaturity. Sure, we benefit from weather and communication satellites, and reconnaissance-sats spread the worldwide strategic transparency that arguably save all our lives, during the Cold War. People are moderately proud of robotic space probes like Hubble and Cassini and Spirit and Opportunity. But, when it comes to dreams of men and women, venturing into vacuum waste, well, you can hardly even find that happening in movie sci fi anymore, let alone our rel-life ambitions.

Certainly, when it comes to the actual Moon itself, I look with skepticism upon any thought of hurrying back there. My own graduate research advisor was the fellow who predicted there might be ice in lightless crater-bottoms, at the north or south lunar poles -- and if it turns out to be true, there may be something useful about the place, someday. But, despite a politician's grandiose boondoggle, it hardly seems a useful destination. Not compared to the riches that await us at near-Earth crossing asteroids, for example. Or that prime piece of real estate that has already caught the Russians' eye -- Phobos. Or the possible abode of life that is Europa.

And yet, in honor of this anniversary, I want to make two points, in defense of those quaint old missions to the Moon.

First, they serve as a backstop against the gloom and pessimism that seem to be preached by cynics of both right and left, at every turn. How many of the arguments for some ambitious enterprise or another begin with: “If we could go to the moon...” Damn right. If we could do that... well... we could do a heckuva lot of cool things, with some gumption, that is.

Finally - I believe the Apollo missions helped to create some of the most important art in human history.

That's a bold and strange statement. But let me dare to define effective visual art as some work or representation that subtly changes human beings just by the sight of it, transforming hearts and minds without verbal or logical persuasion.

By that reckoning, the 20th century featured two hugely effective works of visual art, both of them gifts of physics! First, the terrifying image of the atom bomb altered forever our little-boy romantic attachment to war, beckoning us instead us to grow up a bit in dealing with this new and awesome power to destroy. Defense became the business of serious grownups. Even (especially) among soldiers, war itself is now seen as evidence of failure - an urgent and risky measure arising out of inadequate diplomacy, preparation or deterrence.

The second image that changed us was a gift that arrived at the very end of one of the most difficult years any of us can remember - 1968 - a year that brought most Americans to the brink of exhaustion and despair.

Only then, a final token arrived -- like a gleam of hope shining at the bottom of Pandora’s Box...when the Apollo 8 astronauts brought home that first perfect image of the Earth, floating as a blue marble in space. A picture that moved even the most cynical hearts and changed forever our outlook towards this fragile oasis world.

I'm willing to argue that it was that image -- a work of art that was purely created by humanity’s scientific boldness and ambition -- that transformed us more than anything else. Perhaps making us better, more responsible citizens and world-managers. But also -- one can hope -- possibly sending us down roads that will make us more ready and more worthy, when that day comes for our childrens’ children to reverse things yet again, to once again resume chanting:

“Let’s go!”

====

For a somewhat expanded version of this essay... and other goodies(!)... drop in at the wonderful site TOR.com.

More Science

2009-07-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

More from More Science High! Continuing the cornucopia of interesting things....

I'm on the BBC World Service yet again, this time commenting on "geo-engineering"... or proposals to cool the Earth artificially and compensate for global warming. I'll announce the posted podcast site. Till then, read this background article:

A GIANT inflatable tower could carry people to the edge of space without the need for a rocket, and could be completed much sooner than a cable-based space elevator, its proponents claim. he team envisages assembling the structure from a series of modules constructed from Kevlar-polyethylene composite tubes made rigid by inflating them with a lightweight gas such as helium.My colleague Jeff Hecht has a cool article on this in the New Scientist. Of course, I described this system in SUNDIVER, back in 1979 -- the "Vanilla Needle" - named after my friend, Ron Finnila, who first mentioned the idea to me. I even have extensive notes for a way-cool graphic novel that would have featured Jacob Demwa saving the huge, inflated needle.

Ah, but priority is difficult to establish.... Still, will someone add this to the Brin Prediction wiki, please? Anyone know how to contact the authors? ;-)

Breakthroughs in understanding how memories form in the brain.

“unpleasant memories are stored by the persistent action of the enzyme PKMzeta, a form of protein kinase C,” and that “these memories can be rapidly erased by injecting a PKMzeta inhibitor into the brain.” Researchers confirmed that by using ZIP, “unpleasant long-term memories in the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical for storing spatial information, are rapidly erased.” This raises many questions. If human memory can be erased like a computer's hard drive, what happens to the “overwritten” memories? Is there a biochemical equivalent to disk restoration software?

A girl who looks and acts one or two years old is actually 16 years old. In an almost perfect real life version of Harlarn Ellison's famous short story "Jefty is Five," she seems not to suffer from dwarfism. Albeit with some uneven dysfunctions, she has simply stayed two. Science (performed gently of course) is going to learn a LOT from this special person.

More intelligent people don't have more connections, but they have more efficiently placed connections (??) Other studies have shown that physical connections between brain regions via white matter that doesn't contain neurons are also related to intelligence.

It seems the particles that Enrico Fermi dubbed neutrinos, meaning "little neutral ones", might stretch across billions of light years. The big bang produced huge numbers of "relic" neutrinos, which are quantum-mechanical superpositions of three different mass-energy states. In the early universe, all of these states would have moved at close to the speed of light. But according to calculations by George Fuller and Chad Kishimoto of the University of California, San Diego, as the universe expanded, the most massive of these states slowed down in the relic neutrinos, stretching them across the universe. This raises the possibility that only one of the neutrino's states could fall into a black hole. It's unclear what would happen to the others if this occurred, says Fuller. Wow.

A cell phone that never needs recharging might sound too good to be true, but Nokia says it's developing technology that could draw enough power from ambient radio waves to keep a cell-phone handset topped up. Ambient electromagnetic radiation--emitted from Wi-Fi transmitters, cell-phone antennas, TV masts, and other sources--could be converted into enough electrical current to keep a battery topped up. Hey, my sons just built crystal (diode) radios. They were excited to hear a station, clear as a bell, without battery or wall power! That is, till they found it was K-Praise Fundamentalist station... and no adjustment of the variable capacitor or coil would change it! How can that be? It appears that the diode, itself, is tuned to one station! Help!

The three researchers published a manifesto in Nature in 2001, declaring that the way to make a synthetic cell was to get a protocell and a genetic molecule to grow and divide in parallel, with the molecules being encapsulated in the cell. Simple fatty acids, of the sort likely to have been around on the primitive Earth, will spontaneously form double-layered spheres, much like the double-layered membrane of today’s living cells. These protocells will incorporate new fatty acids fed into the water, and eventually divide.

Living cells are generally impermeable and have elaborate mechanisms for admitting only the nutrients they need. But Dr. Szostak and his colleagues have shown that small molecules can easily enter the protocells. If they combine into larger molecules, however, they cannot get out, just the arrangement a primitive cell would need.

Nucleotides consist of a sugar molecule, like ribose or deoxyribose, joined to a base at one end and a phosphate group at the other. Prebiotic chemists discovered with delight that bases like adenine will easily form from simple chemicals like hydrogen cyanide. But years of disappointment followed when the adenine proved incapable of linking naturally to the ribose.

Last month, John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester in England, reported in Nature his discovery of a quite unexpected route for synthesizing nucleotides from prebiotic chemicals. Instead of making the base and sugar separately from chemicals likely to have existed on the primitive Earth, Dr. Sutherland showed how under the right conditions the base and sugar could be built up as a single unit, and so did not need to be linked.

Another big breakthrough: Researchers l at Imperial College London have discovered that a mixture of left-handed and right-handed molecules can be converted to just one form by cycles of freezing and melting.

See a review of a book about the subtle ways even the simplest life forms "compute."

Political side note. See Russ Daggatt's excellent compilation of views about events in Iran.

Heck while I'm at it: these are the best of the old Outer Limits: Now available on Hulu!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63098/the-outer-limits---original-the-architects-of-fear

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63087/the-outer-limits---original-the-sixth-finger

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63086/the-outer-limits---original-the-man-who-was-never-born

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63097/the-outer-limits---original-second-chance

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63091/the-outer-limits---original-the-bellero-shield

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63077/the-outer-limits---original-moonstone

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63076/the-outer-limits---original-fun-and-games

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63080/the-outer-limits---original-a-feasability-study

http://www.hulu.com/watch/63081/the-outer-limits---original-the-forms-of-things-unknown

"The Architects of Fear" is the episode that inspired the graphic novel WATCHMEN. I hope soon they'll post season two... with the incredible Harlan Ellison story "The Demon With The Glass Hand."

The World Moves Ahead to More Cool Stuff

2009-07-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

Time for my monthly cornucopia of cool (and non-political) news from the exciting world around us.

Brinvolved Items:

"FiRe CTO Design Challenge": Author, physicist, and host David Brin leads the challenge of "Water Beyond Tomorrow: Using Technology and Innovation to Provide San Diego (and the World) with Adequate Safe Water for Future Decades" at this year’s “FiRe Conference (Future in Review).

I had the honor of hosting and stimulating and challenging some of the brightes high technology officers in modern business, including: Sophie Vandebroek, CTO, Xerox, and President, Xerox Innovation Group; Eric Openshaw, Vice Chair and U.S. Technology Leader, Deloitte; Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen, SVP and Chief Innovation Officer, Intuit; Ty Carlson, Architect, SiArch Group, Microsoft; and Joe Burton, CTO, Cisco.

I was interviewed on the BBC World Service on the issue of “bombing” a lunar crater to discover whether there is ice on the moon. The interviewers worried deeply about littering... but it turned into a delightful and fairminded treatment of the topic. If it is no longer up, I hope to post it at http://www.davidbrin.com

See an excellent and eye-opening article about The Participatory Panopticon, by Jamais Cascio, that includes an interview with David Brin about our ongoing rush toward a transparent society.

Reminder that I still have one or two adult memberships to the Montreal World Science Fiction Convention "Anticipation" that I am willing to sell at a discount on the official price.

Non-Brinvolved Items:

See a new blog by the marvelous Beverly Price.

See a fascinating interview with Robert Wright, one of the most important authors of our time, about his new book about the roots of religion.

HPlus Magazine finally releases their new summer issue! It describes the already-existing brain/computer interfaces - and where they could take us - and explains Dartmouth-built robots whose artificial neurons can mimic the human learning process. There's 84 pages of online-only goodness, including laser-stimulated brain cells, artificial muscles, and an interview with NASA's director of research (who suggests robot exploration of Mars). And NPR's Moira Gunn assays the implications of the U.S.'s abrupt welcome for stem cell therapy.

Incredible! The next game intreractive technology:

See the blog of the production company making "The People Vs George Lucas” -- a full length film, due next year, riffing off my book STAR WARS ON TRIAL.

Think Link appears to address some serious deficits in the current, sad state of "discourse" online. I envision combining it with a good reputation system. The result could be a real step toward the kind of "disputation arenas" I described in the American Bar Association's Journal of Dispute Resolution.

Somebody's thinking about What Comes After Email. I have received several emails from people who think there are similarities to my Holocene Project... which I pitched at Google the same day that the patent was awarded, a while back. Me? At a first, hurried glance, I don’t see a whole lot of Holocene in Google Wave... but I can see that it would be vastly improved by incorporating Holocene concepts. Alas, I have found that many bright fellows cannot see the hand in front of their face. Ah well, I wish them well. Opinions?

Stunning. And right now this volcano is affecting our sunsets and dipping global warming.

The issue of cyberwarfare. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html?exprod=myyahoo

A simple way has been found to convert plant cellulose into , a basic building block for fuel, polyesters, and other petroleum-based chemicals... to extract HMF from plants by using a mixture of copper chloride and chromium chloride to break down the cellulose without creating unwanted byproducts. The chlorides didn’t degrade, which meant that the process could be repeated using the same chemicals, reducing the cost of creating HMF while yielding a product with fewer impurities. While still a ways off from commercial applications, the process shows promise in creating an alternative to plastics.

"Near-Term Beamed Sail Propulsion Missions: Cosmos-1 and Sun-Diver", James Benford and Gregory Benford, Beamed Energy Propulsion, AIP Conf. Proc. 664, pg. 358, A. Pakhomov, ed., 2003 Um... "Sundiver?

Apropos of tweeting, I couldn't resist sharing this find of Laurie Morrow's! Do have a look

...and finally...

=== Are We inherently Empathic? ===

New research from Vanderbilt University indicates the way our brain handles how we move through space—including being able to imagine literally stepping into someone else's shoes—may be related to how and why we experience empathy toward others.

Empathy involves, in part, the ability to simulate the internal states of others. The authors hypothesized that our ability to manipulate, rotate and simulate mental representations of the physical world, including our own bodies, would contribute significantly to our ability to empathize. The researchers compared performance on the test with how empathetic the subjects reported themselves to be. They found that higher self-reported empathy was associated with paying more attention to the right side of space. Previous research has found that the left side of the face is more emotionally expressive than the right side. Since the left side of the face would be on the right side of the observer, it is possible that attending more to the expressive side of people's faces would allow one to better understand and respond to their mental state. These findings could also point to a role of the left hemisphere in empathy. (contributed by Stefan.)

Yin vs Yang on Health Care: conservatives make a few points

2009-06-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Lighting the political lamp... Let’s start with evidence that something special is going on. Everybody, you must watch this. Get to know the guy. And make your conservatives watch, too.

Of course, if there are folks on the right who remain impervious to reality. (As there are some on the left.) Indeed, the more sensible and moderate and consually wise Obama seems, the more extreme the fantasies concocted by the crazies. And the more imperative it becomes, for reasonable conservatives to choose the real world.

Speaking of which...

=== Some Conservatives Really Are Openminded ===

My friend, John Mauldin, the brilliant economic analyst, appears to have joined PIMCO’s Bill Gross and other “conservative realists” in breaking away from the standard right-wing doctrine about taxes. Not in all ways or on all issues. But enough to declare independence form Rupert Murdoch’s party line.

For example, they are much more concerned about trillion dollar deficits than about the purported investment-stifling effects of somewhat higher taxes on the upper class. Not only are they resigned (and imply some contentment) at seeing the Bush Era’s biggest set of “largesse” breaks for the wealthy expire, next year, they hint that a modest increase might be the least-bad way to reduce both those deficits and inequities in society. You haven’t seen the punditocracy comment on this trend very much, on TV. But it is a sea change among the brightest, reality-oriented conservatives and may represent the front of real change in republican circles, at least among those who see reason and patriotism and pragmatism as higher virtues than dogmatism.

And now... partly in order to honor those rational conservatives, and meet them partway, here’s something sure to rile a number of you. A remise on last time’s topic of health care. Only from an alternative perspective.

=== A contrarian view of health care ===

In case any of you have come to the false conclusion that I am a reflexive liberal democrat -- simply because I oppose the hijacked monstrosity that the Republican Party has become, let me make clear that I retain plenty of ways that I can exercise contrary orneriness toward the American left. There are times when even the Frankenstein, undead monster than conservatism has become can startle you, by uttering cogent and reasonable “Goldwater-style” objections, instead of the shrill mania pouring from the Murdoch-Limbaugh-Fox nexus. We should be ready, whenever this happens, to heap on positive reinforcement rewards! The biggest reward of all? To actually listen.

One example is where decent conservatives point out genuine drawbacks to the state-run, “universal single payer” health care systems so widely touted in liberal circles. As one who lived for extended periods in both Britain and France, I have to tell you that their systems have much we can learn from.. and also some serious flaws. Without any doubt, they are vastly more fair than ours, and do a far better job at both preventive care and ensuring healthy lives for all kids -- which (as I said last time) should be the core goal of any system.

If we must make a zero-sum choice between Canadian and US health care, then by all means, let’s dump a horror story, in favor of dull, unimaginative and paternalistically meddlesome decency. But I am always suspicious of zero-sum games. If we’re to improve, we should recognize what the current U.S. system does well.

Let’s start by giving conservatives their say. Here’s a quote from Dennis Gartman's eponymous newsletter. "Canada is a wonderful place to have a nasty gash on one's forehead stitched, or to break one's nose in a game of pickup baseball; but have cancer, or need eye surgery, or want an MRI, and the business of medicine in Canada and/or the UK breaks down badly in favor of medical care here in the US. For example... and we wish to thank The Investor's Business Daily for the data noted here this morning...
           "... here in the US men and women survived cancer at an average of just a bit better than 65%. In England only 46% survive. In the US, 93% of those diagnosed with diabetes receive treatment within six months; in Canada only 43% do, and in the UK only 15% do! For those seniors needing a hip replacement and getting one within six months, 15% get it done in the UK; 43% get it done in Canada ... and in the US 90% do! For those waiting to see a medical specialist, 23% of those in the US (fail to) get in within four weeks, while 57% in Canada have not yet done so, and in the UK 60% are still waiting after four weeks. ...... When it comes to proper medical equipment, in the US there are 71 MRI or CT scanners available per million people. In Canada there are but 18, and in the UK there are only 14! Ah, but the best figure of all is this: 11.7% of those 'seniors' in the US with 'low incomes' say they are in excellent health, which in and of itself sounds rather low ... rather disconcerting ... and an indictment of the system itself, doesn't it? But in Canada only 5.8% do!
            "Yessiree bob, ya' jus' gotta' luv that collectivized, socialized medical care! Let's all go break a collective arm and enjoy the benefits of socialized medicine in the Commonwealth! (Canada) ... but heaven help you if you've got something really, really wrong. If that's the case, you'll be running south to the border faster than you can reach a specialist anywhere in Canada; of that we are certain."

Oh, sure, you can spot the use of cherry-picked statistics, right away. (See below.). And you’ll note how Gartman airily dismisses the general preventive care that should be the heart and soul of any national system, especially aimed at kids, waving it away as stitching a “gash in the forehead.” Also, I’d like to see comparison of his figures broken down by age group! And, frankly, I’d like to smack his smug, dismissive face. (He is not one of the of those “reasonable conservatives” I was talking about.)

Nevertheless, putting aside his reactionary reflex and total lack of humility, after his side allowed the calamity of the Bush years, still, Gartman has a point. Because what people tend to ignore is that all health care systems practice rationing. There is simply no way to avoid it, as we all would pay any price, for any chance of health. Thus, there is very little market elasticity. We’ll take our dying loved one to the best doctor, period, and screw the price and screw second best. Capitalist principles are very dicey here. So are paternalistic ones.

The chief difference between the US and the rest of the civilized world is that we let profit-driven insurance companies do the rationing, and they do it based solely on profit considerations and whatever they can get away with. By exiling people who have health conditions, by eliminating the poor, by refusing service for the passive or meek or less influential or less-litigious. On the other hand, those who can pay, and fiercely enforce their insurance contracts, can get their companies to cover vast and endless expenses for procedures aimed even at extending, futilely, the very last and most painful phases of life. The phases that take up to a fourth of all medical expense, in the United States.

Europe etc are different. There, socialist-oid state committees ration procedures, based on criteria that seem to make sense both to those committees and to generally accepted social consensus. While it seems both logical and laudable that they prioritize children and young adults and illnesses that can likely be cured -- a proper role for paternalistic single-payer systems -- it still seems heartless and callous that they pay for this by telling old people, or those with chronic or “hopeless” conditions that little will be spent on them. Indeed, this is why many of the elderly rich, all over the world, fly to America for treatment.

What is seldom mentioned is an added drawback to that system. All the money that America spends (or grotesquely overspends) on unpleasantly difficult conditions - those with a poor prognosis - often results in improved science, treatment and success! In other words, the American system serves as the world’s medical R&D test bed. This is why MRI machines were available here - for those who could pay out the nose - long before state commissions would buy them overseas. (And boy, was I glad to get home and use one, back in 1992, even though it cost me $1,000! Back in Europe, where I had lived, there simply weren’t any available. At all.)

Is the rightwing wrong about Health Care? Sure they are, as they have made a habit of being wrong about just about everything, ever since their movement and party drank Rupert Murdoch’s Koolaid and slid into mania, years ago. The present US Health Care System is a travesty and outrage, period. Nevertheless, the insistence of the Left upon simply adopting what they see overseas, without discussing the drawbacks, is both lazy and doctrinaire. It is not worthy of a nation of innovators.

=== Start Down the Road Incrementally ===

Hence, let me return to something I said before. We could derive the topmost benefit of European style health care if we start by simply providing health care to all kids! Now, immediately. Without any “insurance” rigmarole.   Take care of children. Period. Right away. Just do it!

One method that would take a one page piece of legislation? Simply take Medicare and extend it to the other end of the spectrum, the other demographic group that is both helpless and deserving, by simple definition. Or else, use the kids to experiment with single-payer. Either way, the political opposition would be in a tough spot putting up much resistance! Americans are inherently more socialistic when it comes to children than we feel toward adults (who, we think, almost instinctively, should stand on their own two feet.) Moreover, it lets us act upon prevention and lifelong health investment in youth, by far the best use of medical care dollars.

Seriously, why isn’t this a no-brainer? A win-win that would let Obama achieve wonders at a stroke, while keeping both cost and complexity down and achieving the greatest bang for the buck. Poor parents would be relieved of their greatest fear and then be able to bargain better for their own, narrower coverage. Can anyone explain why this isn’t even mentioned?

And then, with our future safeguarded and the very worst injustice solved, we can gather the best and most sensible people from all sides to compare apples, oranges, grapes and every possible plan for dealing with adult working Americans.

=== ADDENDA ===

“The Obama administration is warning lawmakers that the trust fund that pays for highway construction will go broke in August unless Congress approves an infusion of as much as $7 billion... Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said it's clear that Congress must raise the federal gas tax, which is now 18.4 cents per gallon.”

Naturally, I agree with Voinovich. Our gas taxes are among the lowest on the planet and have encouraged wastrel attitudes for two generations. Still, I’d like to add one suggestion. While the gas tax is being raised, also transform it from a flat rate to a PERCENTAGE of the cost at the pump. That way, it can automatically be indexed to rise when consumption does, and some of that rise can be dedicated to filling strategic reserves and a rainy day fund, to kick in when hard times next return.

* One of you said:

“I sincerely hope that those who would mock Dr. Brin’s "10,000 McVeighs" prediction are paying some attention.The murder of Officer Johns at the Holocaust Museum, the murder of Dr. Tiller, the murder of five chilean students in Miramar Beach Florida by a man obsessed with "Illegals" , and now the murder of a nine year old girl and her father by the Minutemen.”

Alas. Folks, you ain’t seen nothing, yet.

And finally, oooog. See why libertarianism is often its own worst enemy. What a shame.

GM, Health Care, Transparency & Prisoners of War

2009-05-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

Keeping my number of political postings to a bare minimum, let’s just make a potpourri-pile of topical observations.

First... that the bankruptcies of both GM and Chrysler seem to be pretty much following a path I suggested earlier, sending them on a path where they’ll likely become largely employee-owned companies. Ideally - and if they avoid repeating the (deliberately planned-in) mistakes that turned United Airlines sour - this should turn grumpy hourly workers into motivated owners, and allow American ingenuity to thrive. It’s been a long time coming. Both the far left and far right were nuts to oppose it for so long.

Of course, this assumes that the US government will eventually divest its huge stakes in these companies. Which raises an interesting point.

One recent rightwing talking (ranting) point is to yatter about “unprecedented socialism.” This calumny deserves open derision. First, because it's obvious who made our current mess, and who gave unbelievable gushers of “socialism for the rich” to their fat-cat friends -- the Bushite Gang.

Second, turning eyes toward the future, simply ask Limbaugh et al: ”What do you think Obama wants to do with all that GM stock?”

The answer is obvious, and so capitalistic it would make Adam Smith proud. Buy low... and sell high! Dare the ranters to take a bet. If the federal government no longer owns these companies in 2012... and if the taxpayer by then has made a tidy profit out of buying and then selling the shares... um... is that still “socialism?” Remember, the Limbaugh types are agile about redefining terms, focusing on the narrow moment... so ask this question now. And nail down that wager.

=== MAKING A MISTAKE IN HEALTH CARE? ===

On the other hand, I feel that President Obama’s approach to revising Health Care is not well thought-out. Yes, we cannot take on the whole problem all at once, not in today’s economic and political environment. But his people are urging that we continue down the road of adding layer after layer of complex insurance subsidies that will work through (and benefit) existing companies and involve a million twists and turns of bureaucracy and entitlement. It will be maddening, inefficient and easy to ridicule. Worse yet, it will not cut the Gordian Knot of today’s system at any level or at any point.

Elsewhere, I've offered a simple alternative. Let’s put off for another day any major reform for working-age adults. If we have limited resources and attention, let’s not do a half-assed job across-the board, but rather take a targeted approach to solve one part of the mess, completely -- the most important part. Let’s do an immediate and excellent job in the one area where rapid and major transformation could make the biggest immediate difference, where it matters to us all most.

Simply provide health care to all kids.

One way to do this,, making the legislation incredibly short and simple? Extend Medicare to the other end of the spectrum, the other demographic group that is inherently both helpless and deserving, by simple definition. Or else, use the kids to experiment with single-payer.

Either way, political opposition would be disarmed from the start. Americans are inherently more socialistic when it comes to children than adults (who, we think, instinctively, should stand on their own two feet.) Moreover, this step would let us act immediately in the zones where socialized medicine inarguably works best -- prevention and lifelong health investment in youth, by far the best use of medical care dollars.

This approach then leaves for later the vexing areas where socialized medicine has inherent problems and where we might want to do some more careful thinking. (More on this next time.)

Seriously, why isn’t this a no-brainer? A win-win that would let Obama achieve wonders at a stroke, while keeping both cost and complexity down and achieving the greatest bang for the buck? Poor parents would be relieved of their greatest fear, for their kids. With that responsibility taken off their shoulders, they would then be better able to bargain for their own, narrower coverage. Can anyone explain why this alternative isn’t even mentioned?

--- QUOTING OBAMA ON TRANSPARENCY ---

“And so, whenever we cannot release certain information to the public for valid national security reasons, I will insist that there is oversight of my actions - by Congress or by the courts.

“..... Because in our system of checks and balances, someone must always watch over the watchers - especially when it comes to sensitive information.

“Along those same lines, my Administration is also confronting challenges to what is known as the "State Secrets" privilege... while this principle is absolutely necessary to protect national security, I am concerned that it has been over-used. We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrasses the government. That is why my Administration is nearing completion of a thorough review of this practice.

“We plan to embrace several principles for reform. We will apply a stricter legal test to material that can be protected under the State Secrets privilege. We will not assert the privilege in court without first following a formal process, including review by a Justice Department committee and the personal approval of the Attorney General. Finally, each year we will voluntarily report to Congress when we have invoked the privilege and why, because there must be proper oversight of our actions.” - Barack Obama

One of you (“Jester”) commented upon how thoroughly this statement is in tune with what I proposed in The Transparent Society, adding “Dr. Brin, are you writing his Speeches? ;)”

Ah... if only. Still, how nice to have an adult up there, for a change.

--- AND SOLVING PART OF THE GUANTANAMO MESS ---

The same poster offered a suggestion that might help to get President Obama out of his bind regarding the Guantanamo detainees. I think we can all agree that the Bushite doctrines there were dismal, loony, horrific and borderline insane. Those so-called “pragmatists” only made matters far worse for our professional defenders, for example, by making torture legitimate for our enemies to use against our own troops. Indeed, that alone offers probable cause to investigate charges of high treason.

On the other hand, what to do with the prisoners currently held in Guantanamo? Or others we might capture amid a war without borders or fronts? Many are genuinely bad or dangerous men and openly consider themselves to be enemies of the United States. Others, to be sure, were hapless victims of circumstance, but, even after releasing those guys, President Obama seems caught between unpleasant options, when it comes to the really hard cases:

(1) bring some prisoners to America to face charges, which will be difficult to prove by civilian rules, and surely rile up any state where the trials take place,

(2) extend the duration of a somewhat gentler Guantanamo Prison, which will expose him to charges of hypocrisy and indecision,

(3) ship some of the worst off to home countries where they face likely torment and death... or else see them released to heroic welcomes and a return to plotting against our lives.

Are those his only choices? There does seem to be a fourth option, never mentioned. It's pretty simple, as “Jester” pointed out, after a close reading of the four Geneva Conventions.

Those who have openly sworn allegiance to any entity that wages violent war against the US can legitimately be treated as Prisoners of War.

Yes, it sounds a lot like “enemy combatants.” But that term was simply a Bushite excuse to drop every covenant that we had with decent or civilized behavior... a crazed raving offered by demagogues who tried to make us more afraid of a few hundred bozos with lice-ridden beards, than we ever were of a Soviet Union that bristled with 20,000 hydrogen bombs. (And we let them do it, didn’t we?)

In contrast, “prisoner of war” has very clear definitions according to the Geneva conventions. And yes, it can apply to irregular forces, even those that do not represent an official nation state. (In any event, the Taliban government of Afghanistan was clearly an enemy state and it stood behind Al Qaeda. That regime’s continued existence in exile allows for an extended pretext.)

Calling the violent men in Guantanamo "POWs "does not mean they can be tortured. In fact, the opposite. They must be treated according to Geneva protocols -- with red cross packages and everything else to make their existence far brighter than it was. But it does mean they can be held indefinitely, in a military facility on American soil, so long as hostilities continue in a plausible state of war. Moreover, there is no ticking clock to bring charges against them -- in fact, filing charges against such men might be illegal, if their actions were against even somewhat legitimate military targets. Certainly there is no requirement to mix them with the regular population of a federal penitentiary. In fact, that too violates Geneva.

True, this option does not apply to all of the current prisoners -- mostly those who have openly avowed that they consider themselves to be in a state of war against the US. Moreover, they must be treated very different than they were in Guantanamo... e.g. they must be allowed to mingle with each other and garden and work and write home and appeal their conditions and all the things you see in movies like The Great Escape. (Except for the tunneling part, we can hope!)

Still, consider how this option lets BHO & co off the hook! He can end the Guantanamo travesty without letting them all go, or trying to press criminal charges that are inherently hard to stick, by civilian rules of jurisprudence. Well, it's an idea...

And that's enough for now.

Announcements... Coolstuff... and Halliburton

2009-05-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

See my latest manic comedy story “Gorilla My Dreams” in UNIVERSE Magazine (online). This is a very different flavor of humor than my more - well - level-headed comedic serial “The Ancient Ones.” Subscribe to UNIVERSE with this coupon code EE329517B2 and get $5 off!

And yes, this is one of my catch-all postings, filled with wonders... zipping from topic to topic but ending on a serious (and political) note.)

Please drop by the GoodReads web site and see if this endeavors, helping readers connect with authors and books, appeals to you. (Of course, it would not hurt to rate your favorite author there!; )

Some folks try this and comment! Scribd, an Internet start-up here, will introduce on Monday a way for anyone to upload a document to the Web and charge for it.

See my brief essay on the can-do spirit of Star Trek, in The NY Daily News site. I have subsequently thought further. The self-indulgence of including every character from the original series, right away, is as irritating as ever. (In fact, I hate it. The characters spanned a wide range of ages, in fact.) And the massive death toll was disturbing. And the “red matter” and “supernova” stuff could have done with a technical advisor -- someone savvy in both science and fiction, to make it more plausible and less, well, boneheaded. Still, it was overall entertaining and cheerfully manic and within range for me to tune my “expectation dials” and have a rollicking good time.

See a mostly positive article in the Washington Post about the involvement of SIGMA - the think tank of science fiction authors - at a recent conference on Homeland security.

Anyone care to study up on this, telling us more than is in the article? Tantalizing! Ultra-dense deuterium may be the nuclear fuel of the future. I wonder if they are talking about Rydberg Matter. (Thanks Mike G.)

Alas, it’s probably to good to be true. Says Brian Wang: “It isn't even "microscopic amounts" - for "microscopic" means "visible in a microscope". Do the math, fellow NBF visionaries: 2.3 picometers ..... This is not a union-of-deuterons lasting nanoseconds, or microseconds, or milliseconds, or seconds. No, these are the fragments that lasted just long enough for the D(-1) state to hold together in a laser beam for ATTOSECONDS.” sigh.

Fascinating look at “The Economics of Star Trek.”

Side appeal: See BETTER OFF TED on ABC. It is hilarious and terrifically written and needs some buzz in order to survive.

Thoughts on the “natural burial” movement... or “be a tree?”

"Isolation of a gene called DARPP-32 helps explain why some people fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, while others can remain calm. .. Those who had the "TT" or "TC" versions of the gene portrayed significantly more anger than those with the "CC" version." Telegraph 6th May 2009.

Here’s a cool looking new magazine with an ambitious theme and a quirky title: Build a Model Orbiter (!) Seems I’ll be featured in an upcoming article.

Somebody do a book report for us on Jacques Pitrat's new book Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness   “...of interest to anyone who likes robotics, software, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and science-fiction.”

=== Miscellany ===

More than 100 schools have partnered with YouTube to make the YouTube EDU channel, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and UC.

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

GM and Segway demonstrated Tuesday an electric two-wheel, two-seat prototype vehicle for use in congested urban environments. The 300-pound, zero-emissions vehicle is powered by a lithium-ion battery and dual electric wheel motors. It features all-electronic acceleration, steering, and braking.

A new thermodynamic analysis suggests that 10 of life's 20 amino acids must be common throughout the cosmos for reasons that I explicated in my 1983 SETI review article.

A roundup of the coolest computer interfaces past, present, and future.

A sixth nucleotide?

See another TED video about data visualization. The Allosphere.

Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass. Um.... duh?

At a conference last week, researchers showcased many new and innovative ways to interact with machines, from to . Including (out of sci fi) Eye-Tracking Goggles....

Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization.

Ugolog Creates Surveillance Website To Watch Anyone, Anywhere

Free Will... or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests.

    Looking for signals from distant civilizations might be an effort in futility, according to scientists who met at Harvard University recently. The dominant view of astronomers at a symposium on the future of human life in the Universe seems to be that if other life is
out there, it likely is dominated by microbes or other nonspeaking creatures.   If life did develop elsewhere, Andrew Knoll, the Fisher Professor of Natural History, used the lessons of planet Earth to give an idea of what it might take to develop intelligence. Of the three major groupings of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, only the eukaryotes developed complex life. And even among the myriad kinds of eukaryotes, complex life arose in just a few places: animals, plants, fungi, and red and brown algae. Knoll said he believes that the rise of mobility, oxygen levels, and predation, together with its need for sophisticated sensory systems, coordinated activity, and a brain, provided the first steps toward intelligence.

Josh D supplied these about ZOMBIE animals... and maybe zombie humans...brrrr...
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25520
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=399
http://www.genomeweb.com/node/916826?emc=el&m=389886&l=3&v=04b8ffc080

Achieving WaterIndependence

Living Machines. Wowser. And I portrayed them in EARTH, of course.

CaliforniaWaterAndEnergy

http://www.chooseyoursurrogate.com/ does seem to be based on my Kiln People concept. But that's not my biggest complaint. It takes forever to load each page of their site, in exchange for lots of gloss and very little actual information. Frankly, I haven’t the patience to wade slowly through their interface. Somebody try it and report?

What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter? Marvell Technology Group is counting on an army of computer engineers and hackers to answer that question. It has created a “plug computer.” It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device. Inside is a 1.2 gigahertz Marvell chip, called an application processor, running a version of the Linux operating system.

-----
And finally, lighting the political lamp...

Halliburton exposed. This is absolutely necessary to view. A wave of “emergency-override” crony contracts that violated every US contracting law. Anyone who does not realize that this was the main reason for the war has got to be crazy. And mind you I wanted to go and get Saddam! In order to make up for the way Bush Sr. betrayed the Iraqi people in 1991. But that was never the goal. It was the excuse.

Said one viewer: “God, I wish Obama had the balls to go after these bastards. Dig down deep enough, and you'll find the roots leading up to Bush and Cheney.” Indeed, unleashing totally apolitical auditors and civil servants and prosecutors is precisely the way that BHO can attack without seeming to be pursuing a witch hunt. Again... see this video! And get others to do so.

* Oh... and political art dada.

Why Obama is Upping the Border Patrol

2009-05-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

First - see me blather in the next “Life After People” - Tuesday on the History Channel. I offer some way-out speculations!

And now the political lamp is lit: This item wasn’t at the top of the news, but it did make page one of the Times: “Obama budget puts security first at the border - He'll ask Congress to help curb the flow of arms to Mexico before seeking any immigration reform.”

This is a complex topic, with some strange twists. But first, let me quote a forecast that I made, way back in December 08, in my “100 Suggestions for the Obama Administration.” This one really deserves a spot in any Predictions Registry.

“If I seemed to lean a little "left" in some of my earlier missives criticizing a worldwide drift toward crony-aristocratism, and then to the right in supporting a repair of the U.S. military, and then left again by pushing the vital importance of citizen-level resilience... then prepare for another of my patented sudden veers! Because I believe the Obama Administration can, should... and will... act swiftly to regain control over the borders of the United States. In fact, I will lay heavy odds that he does it very soon.”

Although many sneered with doubt, alas, nobody had the guts to meet my bet (and offer of odds!) with real cash. Too bad, because President Obama has given high priority -- and budgetary support -- to regaining control over the borders of the United States, exactly when and as I expected. Let’s go back to my prediction:

”This may sound surprising, but it shouldn't, if you had been paying attention to one of the great ironies of the last 16 years -- one that lay in plain sight, largely unnoticed. As one of his first acts upon entering office, Bill Clinton doubled the number of field agents in the Border Patrol. And one of George W. Bush’s first endeavors was to savagely undercut that service.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, of course, and neither political party ever spoke up about it much. But the reasons are simple. Democrats like legal immigration, which results in lots of new voters and new union workers, while illegals drain resources, get embroiled (against their will) into crime, and prevent domestic programs from achieving full effectiveness. On the other hand, Republicans -- well, not your neighbors, but some influential people near the top of the party -- like access to pools of cheap, undocumented labor that won’t talk back. Only when border state citizens began getting riled did the GOP start talking tough about immigration. And talk, for the most part, is all they ever did.”

The correlation is now perfect. Democrats boost border patrol and enforcement, but hate talking about it, because much of their base is made up of people for whom generosity is a zealous canon. Hence, Obama needed an excuse, something to distract from his real reasons for regaining control at the border (reversing emphasis from illegal to legal immigration.) He found his excuse with the ongoing drug gang violence in Mexico. Blaming much of that chaos on U.S.-originating weaponry, he can claim that the new agents will be there foremost to stanch the southward flow of guns.

Now, the right wing punditocracy and blogosphere has been derisive -- and this time with some cause! The purported “statistics,” proving that most Mexican gang-guns came from the U.S. , are very weak and show signs of being cludged. Anyway, if the cash-rich mobs want guns, there are countless places to get them. So it’s a rationalization, all right.

But while Dobbs and Limbaugh & co. eagerly pounced on this discrepancy with ridicule, they have to be very careful about is not letting their audiences dwell too long or think too deeply about any one matter. They must keep up the rapid armwaving, pointing rapidly thither and yon, in order to distract Red America from connecting the dots. For if rural or conservative whites ever realize which party is always pragmatically better at defending our borders... or maintaining military readiness, or strengthening alliances, or creating a good climate for small businesses, or nurturing a strong economy... then it will be all over for the neoconservative-GOP shell game.

Limbaugh et. al. have to keep it all about simplistic strawmen and ideological stereotypes (e.g. after the most corrupt and wastrel administration of all time pummeled US capitalism nearly flat, scream that the new one is “socialist!”) Because, if the natural anti-authoritarianism of the people living in heartland “red” counties can ever turn away from reflex hatred of bureaucrats, long enough to rediscover Americans’ traditional distrust of fatcat aristocratic thieves, then... well... Rush Limbaugh will have to get a real job.

Even more important, genuine classic conservatives and libertarians will have a chance - at long last - to rescue their movement from the freakshow denizens who have hijacked it.

==== MISCELLANY ====

On April 28 the Senate passed financial fraud legislation that would allow for the creation of an investigative panel modeled after the Depression-era Pecora Commission, which unearthed the crimes that led to the 1929 economic collapse. Some are calling on the House of Representatives to act on creating an independent, muscular probe into the roots of today's financial crisis.

Comics writer Mark Sable was detained by TSA security guards at Los Angeles International Airport this past weekend because he was carrying a script for a new issue of his comic miniseries Unthinkable. Sable was detained while traveling to New York for a debut party at Jim Hanley's Universe today. The comic series follows members of a government think tank that was tasked with coming up with 9/11-type "unthinkable" terrorist scenarios that now are coming true.

NOTE, I will add a lagniappe below, under comments -- an older item, pointing out that Adam Smith is not the only icon of freedom and liberal markets who has been abandoned by the far right. Now they have latched onto Thomas Paine. But they will soon drop him like a live grenade... and I’ll tell you why.

The old and new versions of "culture war"

2009-05-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

This month, we note the 50th Anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures," which described the wide and seemingly unbridgeable gulf of language, assumptions and mindset, between people working in the sciences and intellectuals in the literary arts and humanities. In a a followup essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," Snow optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," might emerge and close the communications gap. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists.

According to sci-tech book agent John Brockman ”This never happened. Although I borrowed Snow's phrase in my 1991 essay "The Third Culture", it does not describe the third culture he predicted.” Indeed, Brockman portrays recent progress as more one-sided than any act of collaboration, with the bridging largely undertaken from the scientific side and most literary mavens playing the unhelpful role of cantankerous curmudgeons.

”The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. Increasingly, The Third Culture has moved into the mainstream and the questions it is asking are those that inform us about ourselves and the world around us.”

Speaking as someone who has moved across both of these worlds without impediment, all my life, I can say that Brockman is mostly right about this. High-end scientists do tend to be vastly more agile and forward-looking thinkers, than their counterparts in almost any other field of endeavor. Instead of narrowly-specialized “boffins,” those at the top of their fields seem to be smarter, more-broadminded and deeply curious than anyone else alive. The reason for this is so astonishingly simple that it seems to have escaped notice. It has nothing to do with any intrinsic superiority of scientific minds. Rather, suppose that a person is truly broadminded and eclectic, wanting to excel in a wide span of fields. He or she must thereupon choose the scientific field of interest to work hardest in, at the professional level, simply because science is exceptionally demanding. That person's other interests, in contrast, can be pursued part-time. Indeed, nearly all of the top scientists I’ve met (and I know many) also nurtured impressive artistic hobbies and passionate avocations, at near-professional levels. They bridge the gap not as invaders from science but as brilliant people who never accepted the existence of any gap, in the first place!

Meanwhile, the intellectual curse of vapid, simpleminded postmodernism has been slow to dissipate from hundreds of university English, Literature and social studies departments. One symptom of this obdurate troglodytism has been the refusal of all but a dozen U.S. universities to pay more than nodding attention to science fiction, the most exploratory and truly American of all genres. Another diagnosable illness is the slavish devotion that so many have pledged to the rigid storytelling tropes that Joseph Campbell called “fundamental” to myth. These rigid prescriptions may have been nearly ubiquitous for 4,000 years, but nobody seems willing to also point out the downside -- that those bardic straightjackets were also fundamentally debasing of the human imagination, helping to limit and crush our shared cultural experience... until we finally broke free of our chains.

And yet, having agreed with much of Brockman’s point, I do have to take some exception. Because the literary types that he and Snow call the “first culture” are not really relevant to the intellectual problems of our age. Self-marginalized and generally silly, the literature profs are no more pertinent for their anti-science thetoric than they ever were a threat to young minds, by promoting “leftist memes.” These were strawman foes, hardly even worth the time spent shrugging them off.

Then why talk about this cultural gap at all? C.P. Snow had an excuse. Especially in his day, the British education system was in large part designed to cauterize scientific or technical “boffins,” keeping them physically and intellectually isolated while ensuring that real power -- cabinet posts , corporate directorships and such -- would be preserved for those steeped in the classics. (Whereupon, completely subjective grading ensured that the sons of aristocracy would slip gracefully into the high positions set aside for them.) Hence a nearly complete lack of “breadth requirements” in most British (indeed, European) baccalaureate programs.

Meanwhile, U.S. students take an extra fourth year longer for their bachelor’s degree, getting exposure across lateral horizons of interest. This important feature of American academic life is seldom mentioned, even though it is an inherent expression of a very different intellectual worldview.

Hence, while American lit departments are only slowly awakening from their prickly, faux-European inferiority complex, others on campus have no problem embracing a new culture of change. At the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), for example, several arts departments have joined with scientific colleagues to forge Sixth College, and the Center for the Study of Computing in the Arts, dedicated to the mission of bridging every perceived gap, with tech-savvy artists and art-loving techies.

No, in America the dangerous gap is not between CP Snow’s old archetype intellectual cultures. Rather, what we are challenged by is a very different “culture war,” in which every kind of anti-intellectualism is fanned by those who most directly benefit from this put-up distraction. One of the tools that help to maintain this debilitating chasm? The metaphor of an obsolete and profoundly misleading, so-called “left-right political axis” -- a curse from 18th Century France that has been a lobotomizing political discourse for generations, focusing attention on a silly, almost meaningless “gap,” when the real chasm is much simpler -- between non-thieves and thieves.

=========

Want to attend Worldcon? The World Science Fiction Convention is always a marvelous show and this year's event Anticipation -- in Montreal, city of fine food and hospitality -- should prove no exception with great panels, previews, the Hugo Awards and a special min-conference on teaching science fiction in the classroom that I labored to help create, along with the fine folks at www.AboutSF and Reading for the Future. Alas, it seems my family won't be able to attend, this year, so we have worldcon memberships for sale! (Three adults and one child, steeply discounted from the regular price.)

= OTHER STUFF =

So cool In case you haven't already seen it -- the launch of a 1/10-scale model of a Saturn V rocket, built by hobbyists. I'd have been impressed if it used liquid hydrogen and multi stages.

Inside These Lenses, a Digital Dimension -- now appearing... my “TruVu Specs”... (Please do let me know when anybody spots more on this trend. I have particular interest.)

ELECTROMAGNETIC pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counter-terrorism analysts. Yael Shahar, director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, and her colleagues have analysed electromagnetic weapons in development or used by military forces worldwide, and have discovered that there is low-cost equipment available online that can act in similar ways. "These will become more of a threat as the electromagnetic weapons technology matures," she says. Douglas Beason, a director at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, says it may be straightforward to build a do-it-yourself EMP weapon, but more difficult to make one that can be stowed in an aircraft.

BTW - Beason is a Brin-pal. See my own suggested measure we should take, in order to solve this threat.

VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies has developed a miniature telephoto lens that can be implanted into the eye and could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration. (VisionCare) Because only the central parts of the retina are damaged in the disease, magnifying the image on the eye allows the retinal cells.

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20091203-18907.html

Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology: ”I learned about research that is nearing completion to develop a strain of E. coli which cannot be infected by bacteriophages. Phages are a major mechanism - likely *the* major mechanism - that keeps bacteria from growing out of control. A phage-proof bacterium might behave very similarly to "red tide" algae blooms, which apparently happen when an algae strain is transported away from its specialized parasites. But E. coli is capable of living in a wide range of environments, including soil, fresh water, and anaerobic conditions. A virus-proof version, with perhaps 50% lower mortality, and (over time) less metabolic load from shedding virus defenses that are no longer needed, might thrive in many conditions where it currently only survives. The researchers doing this acknowledge the theoretical risk that some bacteria might become invasive, but they don't seem to be taking anywhere near the appropriate level of precaution. They are one gene deletion away from creating the strain.” Church's recent article describing the possible future benefits of his work, and possible future safety precautions."

Oh, think it’s time for bold amateur sci fi television?
Cool stuff on Stranger Things TV.