The Abstracted Engineer

Home News

2012-01-25T17:57:00.002-06:00

Big news coming. Stay tuned.

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Will Cutting Defense Spending Slow Innovation?

2012-01-18T08:20:00.000-06:00

It's funny this question came up the same week as the massive, sprawling Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Here we have the NY Times arguing that Defense cuts will hit innovative DoD contractors:

The Pentagon spends about 12 percent of its budget in that area, about $81.4 billion during the most recent fiscal year. That is roughly 55 percent of all federal spending on research and development.

Administration officials, members of Congress and Pentagon planners could choose to spare the research budget when making cuts. Historically, however, significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget have led to reductions in research spending, too. Through both flush and lean times for the Pentagon, research spending has accounted for a roughly similar share — between 9 and 13 percent — of the overall budget.

It is a pot of money with a remarkable record of success. The Navy, which started budgeting for research in 1946, counts 59 eventual Nobel laureates among the recipients of its financing, including Charles H. Townes, whose pioneering work in the development of lasers laid the groundwork for compact discs and laser eye surgery. The other armed forces claim similar numbers of laureates, albeit with considerable overlap.

The results of this research played a key role in the blossoming of high technology as a driver of the nation’s economic growth. In northern Virginia, many of the largest companies continued to work for the Pentagon while also pursuing private contracts.

Meanwhile, CES 2012 in Las Vegas roars on. Here, Gizmodo reports on A TRANSPARENT FREAKING TELEVISION. Let me just type that again so I can enjoy it. A transparent television. Sigh. The company that developed it, Haier, is headquartered in China, which makes it illegal (basically) for them to receive DoD funding. Somehow they were able to make one of the coolest innovations I've seen without a dime of Federal R&D money.
That's the tricky problem isn't it? Economists, Bob Wright, Matt Yglesias...they all try to sort out whether or not a drought in the river of Federal R&D money would lead to a river flowing in from somewhere else.

But here's where I think Yglesias is right:

[T]he question we need to ask about this is how elastic do we think the supply of innovators is. Maybe if spending on military robotics declines, reducing the total returns to robotics-related innovation, the we'll have many fewer people going into robotics and way less innovation. Maybe they'll teach yoga instead. But maybe if spending on military robotics declines then our most talented roboticists will focus more of their time and attention on civilian applications.

As an innovator who works for a company that is part of the military-industrial complex and derives a significant portion of its income from DoD R&D spending I must concur. I am not an innovator because the DoD money comes my way. I am an innovator (I'm not being egomaniacal when I call myself that.) because it is what I am good at and what I enjoy doing. If I leave this company, and the DoD funding that comes with it...my mind won't suddenly switch into drone mode and I won't suddenly be okay with the status quo. Flip it around and you doubly see why Yglesias is right. Every minute I spend on a DoD project is another minute I am not directly innovating for the private sector. And don't be fooled. Many of the projects we do here do not translate in any way into private sector innovations.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that I think Yglesias is right: innovators are in limited supply in this world. And every innovator dreaming up revolutionary missile technologies is one less dreaming up revolutionary clean energy technologies. Every innovator dreaming up smarter weapons is one less dreaming up smarter antibiotics. What I want people to come away with is the realization that the military-industrial complex has gobbled up many innovators over the last three decades who could have made great advances elsewhere, and those people were not replaceable.

*I realize that in internet time, the links provided are ancient. Sorry. I started this post a while ago but life prevented its completion.
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Iowa

2012-01-04T08:10:00.000-06:00

When people on television or the radio talk about Iowa's caucus last night I want you to remember just one thing: only 4% of Iowans voted. The two "winners," Romney and Santorum, each got about 25%, which translates into roughly 30,000 votes in a state of 3 million people. That's actually less than one percent of Iowans supporting each of these guys. Just keep that in mind, when the media talks about "record turnout."

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The Old Man

2011-12-30T22:37:00.000-06:00

There were times that I thought he was incredibly aged. He'd sit on the couch and his eyes would glaze and he'd slip into a nap like a senile cat. He moved so slowly. Sometimes I thought he was just being really careful, other times I thought he was just dimwitted. Either way it left me exasperated.
There was just this way about him, that timeless "you'll see" that every old man says to every young man and every young man subsequently scoffs at, that made me laugh. I knew someday I'd be him, or at least be like him, but I was neither afraid of it nor excited about it. It was just inevitable, so it was a non-issue. Sometimes his wife would tell me (with a roll of her eyes) to "learn" when he'd do something particularly despicable. Like when he'd make misogynistic jokes.
I remember one December day, we were sitting in a duck blind, about 6:45 in the morning. The first hints of sunlight were just appearing, not so much as observable light but as a decreasing concentration of stars in the sky. It was a little below freezing, and we'd had to break through ice to reach our blind. I was wearing a pair of hand-me-down waders that used to belong to the old man. Somewhere, out in the darkness, ducks were babbling to each other and I knew we were about to have a good day. The old man had leaned over, holding his coffee, and said "thanks for coming" as though me being there was his privilege, not mine.
He took me duck hunting, many times. On one occasion, we drove almost 2 hours, in the dead of night, to reach the sweetest honey-hole of duck hunting in the Midwest. We'd put our names in the draw at Bob Brown Wildlife Area and gotten a good spot. As we were breaking ice to create a hole, my waders had split down the middle. To this day, 15 years later, I remember exactly what it feels like to have 32.001 degree water fill both your wader legs up to the crotch. Out of pure love for the old man, I'd kept my mouth shut for nearly a half hour, attempting to hunt despite obvious hypothermia. The old man had been a good sport when, with blue lips, I admitted I was finished. I was 14 years old. It was one of the best days of my life.
When the old man spends time with my daughter he's like Santa Claus - at least in that I've never seen him angry at her. And boy, sometimes she deserves coal. And this is where the aforementioned "you'll see" suddenly becomes poignant. You see, there's this hilarious timelessness that makes me embarrassed: old man tells younger man things, younger man disbelieves, becomes old man, realizes wisdom, and fruitlessly passes it on again.
When I was young, the old man used to laugh and tell me how gleeful he'd be when I was a parent. How he'd look forward to me dealing with my own children, just as he had dealt with his. How he hoped I got "exactly the child I deserved" which I never really knew if it was a compliment or an admonishment at the time.

Here's the thing though: I realize now that when the old man used to say that to me, it wasn't admonishment at all. It wasn't all about the times I was being a miscreant or underachieving in school or lying to my mother or being disappointing in general. What I didn't understand then was there was a flip side. The "child I deserved" was the one that would sit completely silently with me for over nearly two hours, only four years old, during a deer hunt. The "child I deserved" would be the one that was complimented by pretty much everyone for being incredibly smart. The "child I deserved" would love me without hesitation, without qualification, without justification. Just the same way I love the old man.

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LoA

2011-12-30T13:20:00.002-06:00

Holidays 1, Alex Blogging Time 0

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Avarice, Ctd

2011-12-14T18:37:00.000-06:00

Look, I don't have much to add to this incredible article. I just want to point out that the American taxpayer has paid/continues to pay Lockheed-Martin $112 BILLION DOLLARS to build 166 aircraft that have never been used in combat and are already planned to be replaced by an even more expensive aircraft -- built by Lockheed-Martin.

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Sullivan for Paul

2011-12-14T12:41:00.001-06:00

Andrew Sullivan and I EXACTLY agree on this:

In this difficult endeavor, Paul has kept his cool, his good will, his charm, his honesty and his passion. His scorn is for ideas, not people, but he knows how to play legitimate political hardball. Look at his ads - the best of the season so far. His worldview is too extreme for my tastes, but it is more honestly achieved than most of his competitors, and joined to a temperament that has worn well as time has gone by.
I feel the same way about him on the right in 2012 as I did about Obama in 2008. Both were regarded as having zero chance of being elected. And around now, people decided: Why not? And a movement was born. He is the "Change You Can Believe In" on the right. If you are an Independent and can vote in a GOP primary, vote Paul. Of you are a Republican concerned about the degeneracy of the GOP, vote Paul. If you are a citizen who wants more decency and honesty in our politics, vote Paul. If you want someone in the White House who has spent decades in Washington and never been corrupted, vote Paul.

Honestly it is as if I wrote that. RP2012.

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Avarice, Ctd

2011-12-14T09:57:00.000-06:00

This is the time of the year where popular bloggers put out "holiday gift guides" and slyly link to amazon with their username embedded so they get a little kickback if you buy the products they represent as awesome. More often than not, they do not disclose this little circle jerk to the readers. I find that disingenuous and reprehensible.

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Lockheed Martin Shows The Raw Power of Unbridled Avarice

2011-12-13T15:22:00.000-06:00

Imagine you were completely crass and immoral. You wanted to extract as much money as you could from as many people as you could. How would you do it? Here's the three things I would do:
1. I'd defeat my competitors by intentionally underbidding every contract. Or I'd come in at the same cost as my competitor but make outlandish scope promises in my bid.
2. I'd make those bids knowing I could weasel contract modifications in later to get more money. This would be accomplished by "buying" Congress. How would I buy Congress? I would open offices for my company in hundreds of Congressional districts, and I'd use the jobs created as leverage. I'd use the plethora of office locations to spread my work around too, and use the capital being pushed into those districts as further leverage.
3. When I missed deadlines, my competition sued, or the client balked, I'd blame subcontractors or the Client. Then I'd use the political capital I'd earned (mentioned in 2.) and call Congresspersons to make the complaints go away. Then I'd make campaign contributions.

At some point, my company would have offices in more than 140 Congressional districts. I'd be paying tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. I'd be raking in tens of billions in contracts (pdf) during the deepest recession in nearly 100 years. And I'd be catching hell for missing deadlines and for hundred-billion-dollar cost overruns. But I wouldn't care, because I'm crass and immoral.

What I want to know is this: who are the engineers at these sorts of companies? How can they live with themselves? I used to think that engineers were, in general, an ethical bunch compared to average or at least compared to some, like MBAs or Wall Street money launderers. But all these companies that are, in every sense of the word, invested in warmongering and tax-dollar-hoarding seem to employ a small army of engineers. It makes me sad.

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The Falling Price of Solar

2011-12-13T08:23:00.000-06:00

One thing I can NOT stand about libertarians is their dogged repetition of the idea that "letting the market decide" will somehow end well for humanity. My arguments against this belief usually start with "well nuclear missiles are in high demand, as are human organs...so let's deregulate those, right?"

But seriously. Here's the thing. People (for example Megan McArdle) like to point out that even as the price of solar power decreases, it still costs more than fossil fuel-based energy. And that the price drop is being helped by massive government subsidization. Take away the subsidies, they argue, and the appeal of solar will wane immensely.

Here's my rebuttal: just because a thing is expensive doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Let me ask my libertarian friends, "which would you rather continue to fund: the war on drugs or solar installation tax subsidies?" The libertarian purists answer, of course, is "neither" but that wasn't really what I asked. My point is that if I have to pay taxes (which I do), I'd much rather pay them so that I can help decrease the rate at which our species is annihilating life on this planet, as opposed to funding bombs that are strapped to drones and dropped on children in Pakistan. I'd rather pay taxes to subsidize wind farms in western Kansas than subsidize a secret detention center for suspected terrorists.

People might counter that these sorts of decisions aren't either/or, and that I'm creating false choices. That's certainly true and I'll cop to it. But I have to ask libertarians one more question: when civil liberties are under attack from all three branches of government, the 2012 Defense spending bill allows the military to arrest U.S. citizens in America and hold them indefinitely, the President can order the assassination of a U.S. citizen with no trial or publicly-available evidence, and when protesters are being arrested all across the nation and portrayed as worthless entitled children...why are you wasting your considerable blogging talents writing about the vileness of solar subsidies?

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Nightmare Sentence

2011-12-11T16:09:00.000-06:00

Gary Stix:

"If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?"

In Gary's defense the rest of the article is fantastic, and I am looking forward to reading Connectome, the book he is reviewing.

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It's Called Living

2011-12-09T23:00:00.000-06:00

Tonight I am sitting at my wife's school (The Abstracted Wife teaches art at an elementary school) on a cafeteria bench watching my wife hold my daughter. It is "pajama night" at the school. They are browsing the tables of "gifts" that kids could buy. Most range in price from 50 cents to 2 dollars. They're "shopping for a present for daddy" while I pretend not to watch. After they pick something out, I will take The Abstracted Daughter around the tables and let her choose a gift for Mommy.

I hang on to these moments. At work they're talking (very seriously) about layoffs. On TV, Presidential candidates vie for "most insane". Student loans choke me. The money we're saving for a down payment on a house takes a hit because I need work done on my truck. The holidays stress me. Trying to start my own company is a constant source of angst. My KC Star article is due Monday (the draft currently sucks) my weekly devotional is due for church (the draft currently does not exist) and on Sunday at church I get confirmed into Leadership Circle and lead the communion prayer (currently unwritten).

And yet, all of that noise is shattered like glass in this one perfect moment, watching my wife and daughter browse tables of trinkets.

There are a lot of things I admit I do not know. But what I do know is this: happiness and family are two different spellings of the same word.

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Revolution

2011-12-07T12:29:00.000-06:00

Lately, I've been toying with a number of impossible ideas that could easily and radically alter America for the better. Today's idea is this: What if stocks could be bought but not sold? Or what if they could only be sold back to the company that issues the PO?

Discuss amongst yourselves.
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Circumcision, Once Again

2011-12-07T11:21:00.001-06:00

Martin Robbins:

Try this thought experiment. Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find yourself tied to your bed and rendered mute, your naked genitals exposed to the harsh glare of hospital lights. Your parents have decided that some skin should be hacked from your penis; perhaps so you can be forced into their religion, perhaps because they don't trust you to clean yourself in the shower, or perhaps simply because they think your penis should look more like your father's.

If you don't like the thought of this happening to you, if this offends your belief in self-determination or the rights you have over what happens to your body, then how can you justify this practice being inflicted on infants?

Now, try this thought experiment.

Imagine waking up tomorrow to find yourself a writer on a deadline who finds circumcision revolting. You want to write a compelling argument against it but you use citations from Wikipedia and Youtube. Then, you appeal to people's desire for "self-determination" when you try to compel them to follow your opinion.

If you don't like the thought of reading weak arguments, or if you believe that arguments that rely on using scare-words and wikipedia to compel the reader are worthless and degrade the argument in general, then how can you link to these articles on your incredibly popular blog?

Look, here's my problem with circumcision opponents, be they Andrew, Freddie, the people writing these hilariously one-sided wikipedia articles, or even members of my immediate family: mind your own damn business. It's my kid. I don't tell you that your children are screwed up by your decisions, so leave mine alone. That is, if you even have kids (I'd love to see a statistic of how many circumcision opponents are childless). The disgusting, bygone cultural practices that my parents followed and I follow cause you revulsion (I'd love to see a statistic of how many circumcised men are anti-circumcision for their sons)? The seemingly uncivilized cultural practices of Africans or Asians or people from not-your-culture cause you revulsion? Well, sorry to hear that. The diversity of cultures on this planet is one of humanity's strengths. I'm sorry that my penchant for desensitized, easy-to-clean penises frightens you, and makes you think I'm an evil scumbag. But it's my culture. It's different than yours. Deal with it.
There's this trend, (when 'modern' people write medical-ish opinion articles) to suggest that some sort of homogenous medical future could exist, where we all had the exact same top-of-the-line health care and that we'd all be better for it. Typically these people say "look how healthy people are at location X, someday maybe people at location Y and Z could have that same level of care" and then they extend that to basically attack every part of that culture Y and Z that differs from Culture X as unhealthy or unethical and therefore unhealthy.
As though every culture would be better off and happier if the people could live 85 years like we try to do. And that if we just assimilate all cultures into a giant, tapioca, planet-spanning mega-culture that does all the same things and acts in the same ways and has the exact same standards for morality and ethics the world will be a better place for it.

And yet there's a deep hypocrisy here, and it deserves to be mentioned: these people who would desire my conformity to their ethics for the sake of the children are quite happy to expose their children to any number of carcinogenic compounds, suicidally-unhealthy foods, violent behaviors and culturally-inherent risks.
All of us backwoods, violent, evil parents that will circumcise our children will end up with 117 infant deaths (per year in the US), according to some statistics.
Guess how many infants die in vehicular collisions in the US in the same period? Ten times as many. So you parents that are putting your children in cars and driving them around? You offend me by essentially attempting to murder your child. What? Putting your kids in car seats and driving around is part of your culture?
You parents that give your children pillows? You cause 900+ infant deaths a year. Good work, MURDERERS. What? Sleeping on something other than dirt and animal skins is part of your culture?

There's a solution: make circumcision safer. The arguments against it typically come in two fronts: either 1) the child is being put in unnecessary risk by having an elective procedure or 2) the child has some sort of right to defer the procedure until older. To the former, the reverse of logic is true: higher prevalence of circumcision would lead to a decrease in risk: more doctors doing it more often would make them better at it and lower their risk of error. Standardizing it as part of physician training in residency would help as well. To the latter, I have to ask: if there were clear, indisputable evidence that infant boys would grow healthier, smarter, happier, and live longer because they were circumcised...would you still argue that it is genital mutilation? Would you still find it morally reprehensible to force it upon a victim/child even though it would clearly help them? If so, I applaud your purism but are you also against Vitamin K injections? Routine vaccinations like tetanus and diptheria? Diapers? Making children take naps? Making them go to school? Making them brush their teeth? Ask me to make a list of things I've "forced" on my child the last 4 years and then bring me a ream or two of paper. Conversely, if clear medical benefits of circumcision would cause you to change your objection to it...well if I can erode your argument that easily why are you even bothering?

Look, I'm never going to convince anyone who opposes circumcision to suddenly be okay with it. Similarly, nobody is going to convince me that I was "mutilated" as an infant when I was circumcised. And that is the crux of a world with different cultures: there is no normative ethic for circumcision, just my applied ethic and your applied ethic. People don't seem to grasp that.

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A Post About All The Pros of the Military-Industrial Complex

2011-11-29T11:09:00.001-06:00

Governor Sam Brownback

2011-11-29T07:56:00.000-06:00

So it turns out that Governor Sam Brownback has an internal team that works for Governor Sam Brownback that searches social media for instances of the name Governor Sam Brownback.
Now, rather than use this knowledge to troll Governor Sam Brownback's policies or bash Governor Sam Brownback personally...well...readers of this blog know that I recently applied to be a NASA astronaut.

So (operating under the assumption that Governor Sam Brownback's social investigation team will find this post) I'd like to use this opportunity to send a message to Governor Sam Brownback personally:

Governor Brownback,
If you put in a call to Charles Bolden and/or Lori Garver at NASA and get me on the top of the pile for the astronaut job, I'll gladly be your 'yes man' from here on out. Some of your policies are not especially tasteful to me, but all that will be forgotten, instantly, Governor Brownback, if you use your limitless connections, bountiful charisma and charming good looks to help me get that astronaut job. In fact, I will personally call you, from space, to thank you for your wonderful assistance and will overtly and in front of the entire world (literally) praise you as the best Governor the state of Kansas has ever seen.
Your humble and obedient,
Alex Waller

There's no "or else" here, no "otherwise." I remember when I was in high school that getting into a military academy essentially required a letter of recommendation from a public servant. I'm sure the Governor Sam Brownback seal of approval would help with NASA! So thanks in advance, Governor Sam Brownback.

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The BCS system

2011-11-23T14:07:00.000-06:00

"Bottom line is, the BCS is flawed," [David] Shaw said. "They themselves know it, which is why they proposed a lot of changes going forward. All I've heard all year is the computers don't like Stanford. Well, the computers haven't programmed themselves.

Not yet, Dave...not yet.

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Puff Piece, Redefined

2011-11-23T12:06:00.000-06:00

Link.

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Rhetoric

2011-11-23T08:51:00.000-06:00

Against massive troop deployments (without Congressional consent) to countries where the locals hate us? You're an isolationist.

Willing to consider raising taxes to cover national debt? You're a socialist.

Not willing to universally support whatever Israel does? You're an anti-semite.

In this country, we got right to the most extreme rhetoric we can think of, and then try to find an even worse extreme.

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Contacting Aliens

2011-11-21T08:46:00.000-06:00

Let me just bounce this off Hanson's post about the probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, on 100 or so planets.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. The dilemma is this: if aliens live on another planet in our galaxy, and drive their alien-cars to their alien-work and read the alien-news and occasionally blast radio waves into space in hopes that other aliens (us) will detect it, and if they are 40,000 light years away (relatively close in galactic terms - the Milky Way is 100,000 or so light years in diameter) we won't detect their radio waves they are sending today for another 40,000 years, by which time their alien civilization may be long gone, or conversely ours might be as well.
So the usual end argument of astrobiologists and their dissenters is that "even if alien civilizations are a statistical certainty in the Milky Way Galaxy, its pointless to consider First Contact because it will not occur in any reasonable amount of time due to the size constraints of the galaxy."
A corollary argument is this: modern humans have lived on this planet for 200,000 years or so, and before that protohumans lived on this planet for 3 million years. Before that, life evolved in one form or another for a few billion years. And our star has existed for about 4.5 billion years. We've had the ability to broadcast radio waves for about 100 years. So if an alien race were to have looked at the Sun for our radio waves (the way the SETI program looks at other stars for alien radio waves) they would have a 1/45,000,000 chance, or 0.000000225% chance of looking at Sol during the radio-broadcast-era of our solar system. Certainly, as our civilization continues the length of time we've been barfing radio broadcasts into space increases, but it still remains a tiny percentage. So aliens, in all likelihood, have looked at our solar system in their own SETI program and simply missed us - we're too new to the intergalactic game. Flip that around and realize that the chances we will see alien radio broadcasts in our SETI programs is incredibly slim. Winning lottery ticket slim, really.

Worse yet, who is to say that humans will use radio-wave-based data transmission forever? What if the natural evolution of an Intelligent Civilization in the universe is to evolve large brains, master fire, build agriculture, harness silicon, spend a couple hundred years wirelessly transmitting via radio waves, and then discovering an even better method of wireless information broadcast and abandoning radio waves completely. The results would be that if this held true for other civilizations, searching for alien radio waves would be an even more ridiculous 1-in-a-zillion. We'd have to catch their broadcasts during their short radio-wave episode of their Intelligent Civilization.

So what communication system would an advanced civilization (either ours or an alien) use to communicate? It certainly seems logical that radio waves of sufficient strength can fulfill all the information broadcast requirements of a single-planet-inhabiting civilization, but what if humans colonize Mars? A 9.5 minute delay between every signal is a frustrating. Then imagine we send colonists deeper into space, having discovered other "M-class" planets. Radio signals to/from them would take weeks to travel through space.
So a faster-than-light communication method seems the only plausible thing.

Suspend judgement, dear reader! I understand the surreality of concepts involving "faster than light" anything, but for the sake of argument I want us to assume that sufficient advances in gravitational control as well as increasing harnessing of energy sources allows one to produce an artificial method for transmitting data faster-than-light.
So here's the thing: if we imagine that future-humans will develop some sort of FTL data transmission method, I think we need to figure out some candidate methods that would work, then try to detect the data from those. If radio transmission is a dead end, which I think it will be in a couple centuries, we need to start imagining what the next thing will be. We don't have to develop the ability to transmit data...just to hear the transmissions being sent around the Galaxy by advanced alien civilizations.
Think of it like this: we're Native Americans, sending smoke signals, and the advanced aliens in our galaxy are the Post Office riders. We do not need to build our own postal system and then exchange mail with the alien post riders: we just need to figure out what is in those riders' satchels and intercept the mail.

I dunno, ya know? It's a long shot, but then again, so is everything when it comes to the Galaxy.

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Applying To Be An Astronaut

2011-11-17T15:00:00.004-06:00

Wow there's a lot of forms.

Updated: Where it asked for "relevant skills" I put "experienced in zero-g hand to hand combat" because I read Ender's Game like 50 times as a kid.

Update 2: Where it asked in what languages I was proficient, I put down "English, Russian, and European."
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Bundling Books

2011-11-16T19:58:00.000-06:00

One of the annoying things about television is summarized by the immortal phrase "hundreds of channels and nothing on." One reason for this (though not the only one) is that channels are provided in bundles. For example Discovery Channel typically comes with a cadre of other channels like Discovery Health, the Military Channel, TLC and BBC America. If a cable provider, like AT&T Uverse, wants to provide Discovery Channel to its users, it must buy the bundle from Discovery Communications, Inc. Similar bundles exist from many outlets (for example the 30 ESPN channels you get).
However it is annoying to users because by and large they only want one or a few of the channels in a bundle, but they pay for all of them.
Virginia Postrel suggests digital books should be bundled in a similar manner, where a consumer must buy a bundle of books to get the one they want. This, she argues, will help buoy sales of less popular books:

Every book is indeed different, but that’s no excuse for charging more than the market will bear. And, at least for digital copies, there’s a way around the “every book is different” problem: bundling a lot of books together, charging a flat fee, and letting customers use whichever ones they like best.

How will this solve any problems? Why should a consumer be forced to pay for books they don't want? I can only see consumer irritation from this plan, the same way consumers hate forced buying bundles of television channels to get the few channels they actually will watch.

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Conflicted, or NASA Is Hiring Astronauts And I Want To Be One

2011-11-16T08:20:00.000-06:00

Long time readers of this blog know that on more than one occasion I have taken potshots at NASA. I've complained that manned spaceflight, while a noble pursuit, seems perilous and without point unless a clear direction is given. For example, if manned spaceflight involves building an orbital launch vehicle to send terraforming equipment to Mars...I'm all for it. Manned spaceflight as an economic stimulus mechanism for east Florida, on the other hand, I do not like.
I've laid out on this blog a time or two what I think should happen, going so far as to say we need to completely reboot NASA. I've suggested more robotic space missions and less manned missions would further what I see as the ultimate goal of space travel: preventing humanity's extinction by increasing the number of planets we inhabit from 1 to 2+.

All that being said, this morning I found out that NASA is taking applications for astronauts. And as I type this post, I have the application open on my second monitor. I cannot lie: this is the most appealing job application I've ever come across.

But here's the conflict: clearly I have issues with NASA. Clearly I have made those public. My name is on this blog, and honestly I stand by pretty much all the things I've said (things I do not stand by are summarily redacted). So I wonder if I would really stand a chance. I easily meet all the physical and academic qualifications for the position. Two degrees in engineering, 5 years experience designing/building both large electromechanical systems as well as small electronic devices. Significant experience with electrical design and circuit boards. Great health. From the applications: "Creativity. Ambition. Teamwork. A sense of daring. And a probing mind. That's what it takes to join NASA..." I got those covered!

But I have to wonder if they would only consider ardent NASA fanboys? If that is the case, let me please quote myself, from a post entitled "In Defense of NASA":

Listen, I am a big, big fan of NASA. Their mission statement, "To improve life here, to extend life to there, to find life beyond" is succinct and brilliant. When I was barely 6 years old I saw a shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral. We were several miles away, but even from there, you could see the glowing beast of a shuttle hurl into the sky, and watch the primary rockets fall away, until the shuttle was eventually lost from view. I grew up with a father who dreamed of going to space, and then vicariously dreamed that I might go to space. I watched Star Trek and Star Wars religiously. The crazy missions to the Hubble, Mars, and the construction of the ISS have all been highlights in my life. I was one of the people who let the SETI program borrow my computer at night to process radio wave information.
I don't need to go on really. I know how much NASA, and space exploration, means to me. And that is exactly why I am so critical of it! Watching your single favorite government organization fall into bureaucratic oblivion, pandering to the whims of whatever the current President says the agenda should be, overspending their budget year after year funding elephantine projects with no clear timeline or budget, not requiring their subs to perform at a certain level, and worst of all: creating unattainable, but PR-friendly goals and then spending enormous amounts of money on not achieving them...these are hard pills to swallow

All this being said, I think I will apply to be an astronaut. "Be the change you want to see in the world," goes the oft repeated quote. I guess if I want to fix NASA, the right way to do it would be from the inside, not from the comfort of my computer at my desk in Kansas. In that post, I also wrote:

My father likes to chide sports commentators with this line: "if these idiots knew so much, why aren't they coaches?" The same could possibly be aimed at me. If I have all the answers to NASA's problems, why don't I be put in charge of NASA? Wouldn't I like that?

I guess I should stop commentating and try coaching.

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Things I Will Believe When I See

2011-11-15T08:06:00.001-06:00

Computer animations of robotic animals are pretty easy to produce. I know this because my roommate and I used to do it for fun in college.

So earlier this year when BostonDynamics robot cheetah animation came out...I held my breath.

Now we have a robot ostrich animation complete with weird render that looks like a Halflife 2 creature! It'd be neat if it was built, sure. But I'll hold my breath in the mean time.

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Scott Adams' Cyborg Evolution

2011-11-10T10:13:00.001-06:00

Scott Adams thinks that health monitoring will be the first substantial step in our "cyborg evolution." Welcome to the club, Scott.

Here at TAE, the inevitable seamless integration of machine and man has been discussed too many times for me to link to. Heh.
But I want to make a point about Adams' piece, because I think he understates the ideal. His vision:

I predict that health monitoring will be the next substantial phase of cyborg evolution. I think we'll have embedded chips to continuously monitor our blood for sugar levels, cholesterol, vitamins, minerals, salt, specific diseases, and more. I think we'll also have monitors on our bodies to tell us when our brains are at their peak levels (for thinking tasks) and when our bodies are most energetic (for exercise). Perhaps our monitors will tell us when to eat and what to eat. Monitors might tell us when we are hydrated, when we have enough fiber in our diets, and when we need more sleep. You can imagine a long list of what the monitors might tell us. The embedded monitors might be powered by your body chemistry and communicate with your smartphone when it's near.

I question why we need the smartphone at all? Why not have the monitor calculate the nutrients our body needs and then simply regulate the liver to efficiently digest the right amounts of the right molecules? I don't have time to take pictures of food and record if I feel energized. I don't want to spend my time putting my diet into MyFitnessPal. I want to just have a device implanted in my liver that checks my nutrient levels and then adjusts my body chemistry accordingly.
Adams envisions a monitor that tells us when our brains are at peak performance. I envision a device that keeps my brain at peak performance all the time! Adams' envisions a device that tells me when I need more sleep. I envision a device that not only helps regulate my sleep patterns, but increases the efficiency of my sleep patterns so I get "40 winks" in 30 winks' time.

Adams imagines a world where we're enshrouded in devices which improve our quality of life. I agree this is the future...but an iterative one. I imagine a future where we aren't enshrouded by devices...we are one with them.

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Watching Your Friends Drink Kool-Aid

2011-11-08T13:04:00.000-06:00

You know, I don't have a Twitter account. I never really see the utility in it; always seems like just a bunch of white noise. People who trumpet it as an innovation usually point to its power for news dissemination, for example when the East Coast experienced an earthquake earlier this year. Others contend that Twitter was instrumental in the Arab Spring uprisings, helping to organize protests. That's a fallacious argument to me, because people have rioted and protested for hundreds of years before there was Twitter. It's just that before Twitter, people actually had to talk to each other in order to spread the word.

But for me Twitter does have one utility, namely it allows me to watch the slow decay of my peers as they helplessly fall prey to the consumerist lifestyle they've come to believe matters. I should add that the example tweets I use aren't meant to be attacks on individuals (these people are acquaintances), simply I used them because they prove my point and you people just put it out there in public so everyone can see. Theoretically I'm helping you.

There's this epidemic, and Freddie nails it, of competitive consumerism in my generation. Everyone's drinking the Kool-Aid of a capitalistic culture that says "the herd is happy" and that somehow you must fit in while simultaneously rising above everyone else in your individuality and innovative consumerism. And so you end up with a massive, generational flocking effect...everyone tries to stay as close together as possible, and a tiny perturbation - new, hip, pointy-toed shoes - causes a ripple where the whole flock massively pivots to follow that first-turning bird. And while the seemingly mindless collective flock of individuals sticks tightly together, they tweet back and forth about it.

I hate to tell you this, but your ability to pass an online quiz that proves you can tell a good pino from a bad cab really doesn't matter to anyone. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You found a 100-point cab for $16 at so-and-so's liquor store? No one cares. No one. In fact the statistically proven, temporal subjectivity of the 100-point score renders it worthless too. Your groupon deal for unlimited yoga for $30 might be impressive to you, but you're basically just wasting electricity retweeting it...everyone who would want that deal would have to already be signed up to Groupon (and already have seen the deal) or have to join Groupon to get the deal (in which case they'd immediately see the deal) so you've really done nothing but brainlessly advertise for Groupon for free. Good work.

Someday, not too far in the future, one of these people will realize things like "I actually didn't really like HealthRidge Fitness Club" but they won't tweet "ignore my tweet from three months ago. #hindsightis20/20" The 100-point cab they spilled all over the twittersphere will be long forgotten, and the cheaper, lower-ranked wine they enjoy even more won't cause them to retroactively go back and tweet "100-point wine was overrated by 7 points IMHO #iwasshortsighted". You're not going to see a tweet from the above person "@RoadID I never really use this thing, had it 5 years and never needed it, why did I waste my money?"
Because retroactive self-abasement goes against the competitive consumerist's nature. You can't look back in regret because to do so would admit weakness in prescience. And it is the illusion of indefatigable prescience that powers the competitive consumerists of my generation. It is only boldly forward, boldly onward for the competitive consumerist, in whichever direction the flock takes them.

One more thing about prosthetics

2011-11-03T09:45:00.000-05:00

Micro-sensor-embedded-fiber-optic-super-prosthetics may hold promise for future American soldiers that lose limbs...but what does that uninsured amputee in Botswana do? As medical breakthroughs become more and more expensive to develop...they become more and more disconnected from the places they are truly needed.

The counter-argument, that these technologies need to be developed in the First World and become profitable and then the patents run out and then it gets cheaper and then eventually it trickles down to the Third World...that argument falls short when you try to find a person living in the Third World that has a pacemaker.

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Prosthetics Is About Software

2011-11-03T09:17:00.000-05:00

First off, I applaud this effort. Amazing science in progress.

However, look at that diagram...they want to create an awfully complicated design. Tiny optical mirrors are placed along equally microscopic optical fibers, which are then wound around individual nerves. A nerve signal headed for an amputated limb is detected by these microsensors and they transmit the signal via the optical fiber to a CPU of some sort which will then move the limb. Theoretically feedback could go the other way - touching an object could fire off haptic sensors which would then send an infrared laser signal through the fiber optic cable to the mirror and trigger a nerve pulse, which would then be carried to the brain.

Okay, here's the thing. The article, and the researches in it, make brain-machine interface seem like a really crappy technology with no promise. But practical, functioning prototypes of their technology is "a decade off" they admit. They claim: "Even a bleeding-edge, brain-based prosthetic would only offer a few degrees of movement, and because electrical signals are relatively slow, you couldn’t move as quickly as someone with a real arm."
The problem with this claim is that anyone with a basic understanding of bioelectric signals knows that the transmission speed of electrical signals in copper wires is thousands and thousands and thousands of times faster than the signal transmission speed in nerves. In fact, because the transmission speed of nerves is SO slow, early multi-cellular life forms evolved myelin sheaths, which speed up the transmission rate of nerve signals, at the cost of signal strength. Myelin sheaths are spaced along a nerve fiber, and the signal shoots through them, then reconcentrates in the inter-mylin nerve fiber space, then shoots through the next one. It's all explained here.
The point is that their core argument against brain-implant prosthetics is that the slowness of them is what causes the difficulty in doing simple tasks. That is simply not true. They further claim their fiber optic method will mitigate this problem...that's probably not true....but we won't know for another decade, right?

The reason, dear readers, that brain-controlled prostheses lack mobility is two-fold. First, the electromechanical design of prosthetics is still limited by our ability to make artificial muscle. We use servos to simulate elbows and knees. In a way we do it backwards of nature. Nature puts the muscles between the joints, then pulls on the joints to move them. We put the "muscle" in the joint, and actuate it right there on site.

The second reason for the difficulties in brain-controlled prostheses is that we simply have not developed software to decode the brain. Put one of these babies on, and you can get a pretty diverse and interesting real-time electrical output from the brain. But first, no one wants to wear that, and second, the amount of data is simply overwhelming. When I think about typing the letter "t", my brain produces a very specific electrical signal. However, it's lost in the noise of me thinking about moving my eyeballs, thinking about maintaining my posture in this chair (or should I say maintaining my slouch in this chair?), and thinking whatever else I am thinking. When you have billions of signal generators that maintain trillions of interconnections...you simply get a TON of noise. And so the difficulties in moving a prosthetic with your thoughts alone has nothing to do with signal velocity and instead has everything to do with signal integrity. If I had a prosthetic arm and wanted to type the letter 't' I would have to think really really hard about it so that the software in the brain-implant-computer-whatever could clearly through all the noise see I wanted to type that letter. Thinking hard is a lot slower than regular thinking.

So I humbly submit: the hardware you use to interface with the amputee is irrelevant, mostly. As long as you can interrupt and monitor the brain's commands...either at the brain or at the stump...you can move the hardware. What matters is signal processing, which lies in the software. This is a problem, I think, for mechanical engineers like me and electrical engineers and neurophotonics researchers to accept: we're not the important part of this puzzle.

But this goes back to TAE's Law of Bionics that I submitted on this blog many times, and it bears repeating now: All You Need Is Drivers. The only thing stopping me from having a functioning USB port on my arm is that we lack the drivers for the two hardware systems to communicate. All you need is drivers. All you need is drivers. All you need is drivers.

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Retirement

2011-10-31T08:28:00.001-05:00

Here at work they're doing away with pensions. The change will be to a more 'aggressive' cooperative 403b (we're a 501(c)3 nfp) plan, where if you invest 6% they'll match an additional 3%.

I have to wonder: are retirement plans really just some creamy corporate milk that companies feed you to keep you placated? If I were to take my salary today, and assume a 3% pay raise every year for the next 35 years, and then take 9% of that and invest it every year, and then get a healthy 7% return on my investment every year...I'd end up 65 years old with $1.1 million in the bank. Of course, that's $1.1 million in 2046 dollars. Back track to current dollars and I'd have about $568,000 if I were doing this today. And of course this is hilariously illusory because who has managed a 7% year over year the last 15 years? No one.

At least I have the comfort of knowing that when I retire in 2046 I can rely on my Social Security checks...oh wait.
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Engineering: A Bubble?

2011-10-27T10:18:00.000-05:00

One of the things about engineers that people forget (or don't) is that we have a really high employment rate, an average salary that easily puts us in the upper middle class, and typically engineers enjoy a career that can be upwardly mobile, with six figure incomes reasonable in your first decade of work.
One might argue that the above job security factors are inherent in a system where getting a diploma from a four-year ABET accredited university in some engineering field is extremely difficult, and that the massive washout rate (75%) for freshman/sophomore engineering majors is evidence of the rarity/justification for the salaries of engineers. Or that the difficulties of the profession merit the pay. I wouldn't argue either of these points are wrong. They're just not explanatory of why engineers are thriving.
A lot of other college majors are hard. Take, for instance, biochemistry - where a student must master high level chemistry, math, and biology. And yet biochemists in general do not enjoy the pay rate, nor the upward mobility, that engineers do.

The answer, I'm afraid, is simply that this is the right world and right time to be an engineer. Engineers have become the ubiquitous go-to in a world where the average Joe can barely find the reset button on their wall clock. We design everything in your life. We build it. We design and build the store where it is sold. We design and build the manufacturing facility where it is designed and built. We design the store shelves it sits on, the cash register where you pay for it. The network of fiber optic cables that processes your electronic payment - we designed that, too. And programmed the software. We designed your car, the roads, the street lights, the stop signs. Even your mailbox...somewhere there's an engineering drawing for that thing. When you climb your stairs and go brush your teeth, thank the engineers that design, maintain, and coordinate your clean water supply, and who develop the packaging for your toothpaste. When you call someone on your phone, thank the engineer that designed the phone, the engineer that designed the software on it, the engineer that designed the radio tower, the engineer that designed the electrical cables...and so on and so forth.

Let's take one specific example, to further this point: the life cycle of corn. For this case, "designed by engineers" will be shortened to DBE. A farmer drives his truck (DBE) to the co-op and buys bags of seed corn. The bags? DBE. The farmer then drives them home and pours them into his planter (DBE) that is pulled behind a tractor (DBE). Earlier, he used a sprayer (DBE) to prep the field for planting. Behind the planter he pulls a fertilizer (DBE) sprayer. The corn grows up nice and tall. At the harvest, he drives a combine (DBE) that cuts the corn plants and separates the straw and chaff from the kernels of corn. The corn is then augured into a trailer (DBE) and driven to the co-op (DBE) where it is stored in massive holding silos (DBE). Soon it is sold and ground up with other ingredients (DBE) and fed to livestock. The livestock are butchered in a plant (DBE) and shipped in chilled trucks (DBE) to grocery stores (DBE) all over the country. I think you get the point. We engineers have our fingers in every pie. And there's a good reason for this.

Technology, quite simply, is at an engineer's level. Which wasn't always the case. Engineers did important work for the last ten decades, don't get me wrong. But we didn't always have digital displays on microwaves (or microwaves at all for that matter). We didn't have wireless internet connections in our homes. Our daily lives, 50 years ago, depended on engineers to be sure. It's just that the reach of engineers was a lot narrower. People didn't need a chemical engineer to formulate toothpaste back when a box of baking soda would do. People didn't need an electrical engineer to design in-car GPS systems when a map would do. It's just that, throughout the last century if you wanted to improve people's lives in terms of economy, simplicity, or efficiency, you took an existing practice and put an engineer on it. The question is whether (more like when) engineering is a field that will reach employment saturation.

I've argued before (maybe not here but somewhere; I love to argue) that mechanical engineering is approaching obsolescence. Or maybe obsolescence is the wrong word. I think a better word would be to say that mechanical engineering is evolving into a supportive role in engineering. What do I mean? Well take for instance robotics. No longer are mechanical relays and actuators the primary driving focus of the robotic design. Instead, the electrical engineer's ability to embed circuitry, and the software engineer's ability to upload intelligence into that circuitry, has become paramount. Hydraulic pistons are hydraulic pistons. A mechanical engineer that was doing robotics 20 years ago with hydraulic actuators would still know how to operate in today's world. Only, the pistons wouldn't be controlled by pneumatic valves anymore, they'd be controlled with electrically-actuated valves with PID control architecture and feedback fuzzy logic...
Obviously this is a sensitive topic for me, as my title at work is "staff mechanical engineer" but even I see the end of the days where hordes of mechanical engineers go design cars or airplanes. Soon, instead of leading design efforts, their job will be to design packaging for electronics. Already this shift is happening. I know this because it is my job.

Combine this with the surge in engineers graduating from Universities - not so much here but in India and China. India is (by some accounts) producing 400,000 engineers a year, and that was five years ago. China is producing, depending on your source, at least that many if not 25% more. That's a lot of engineers. Add in engineers in all other countries combined and you are adding 1.5 million or so each year to the global engineering pool. Meanwhile, many economies are stagnant. The demand for engineers isn't going up as fast as the supply. Some argue that Chinese and Indian engineers do not take vacant jobs, they simply displace existing engineers from the current pool, either by literally taking their job or by making their company more capability-competitive in the market and forcing cuts at foreign companies.

So let's come back around to the original question: is engineering a bubble? The short answer is probably not. People aren't jumping into it for the easy money. Hiring engineers is a a pretty low-risk investment. But the evolution of the field of engineering has been one of broadening influence, increased specialization, increased collaboration, and an increase in project speed. It is the need for specialization that drives the current boom in engineering. No single engineer has the knowledge required to build the iPad. You need hundreds, each with a particular skill, all working in careful unison, to produce that sort of technology. Same for things like Garmin GPS. They employ hundreds of engineers to produce their products. Mechanical engineers that specialize in rapid prototyping, mechanical engineers that specialize in injection molding, mechanical engineers that specialize in PCB packaging/interfacing, mechanical engineers that specialize in packaging the device in boxes...and that's to just name the MechE's involved. Add in electrical engineers, computer engineers, computer programmers...and you get quite a cadre of specialized engineers, all working in unison on little bits and pieces of mega-complicated engineering projects.

The flip side of this is that increased specialization requirements drive a growth market in engineering, but also put more engineers at risk for sudden obsolescence. The idea of bubbles is that they grow fast and pop hard. Specialized engineering fields, on the other hand, grow slow and die slow. But make no mistake, I really believe that engineering fields will go away as technology drives them into obsolescence. My wise words to college students? Differentiate yourself from all your peers by double majoring in two different-but-related engineering majors. You'll have to work harder, obviously, but if the two majors are related then a lot of courses will count towards both degrees and you won't have to take too many extra courses. Your double major will make you doubly employable. Then, when you get hired, start learning a third engineering field on your own.
For example, I majored in biological engineering as an undergrad, then switched to mechanical engineering in grad school. As soon as I graduated, I began teaching myself electrical engineering and now I'm learning to write in C#, Java and Objective-C. Cross-disciplinary engineers are the kings of the engineering world.

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The Limits of Steve Jobs

2011-10-27T07:29:00.000-05:00

There were some things that were sacred to Steve:

"Every evening, he would have dinner around the kitchen table with his wife and kids. He didn't go out socializing or to black-tie dinners. He didn't travel much. Even though he was focused on his work, he was always home for dinner."

Foster Care and Austerity Politics

2011-10-26T15:30:00.000-05:00

In an eye-opening and poignant article, Ben Dueholm writes about the state of foster care in America:

In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia’s broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many medical practices, his endeavored at all costs to avoid working for Medicaid’s paltry reimbursement rates. (The office went so far as to deny ever having treated her; eventually, however, they gave in.) We went through a similar amount of stress trying to put Sophia into daycare. We had to run down a pile of government paperwork, prove our employment, and then simply wait and hope that our daycare center would accept the state’s stingy pay. And yet, frustrated as we were, we couldn’t exactly blame the doctors and daycare providers for being heartless. As the state’s stinginess pushes more of the costs of caring for foster children onto them, it’s no surprise that they start to balk.

It’s a major bureaucratic process to remove a child from her home and family. The state insures the child, pays for daycare, investigates the claims of abuse, and retains legal custody, but it cannot actually put a baby to bed at night. And so, on the other side of this most intimate public-private partnership are usually people like us, left alone with a stranger’s child and a garbage bag full of clothes and wondering what’s going to happen next. And what happens next depends, to a stomach-churning degree, on the state’s willingness and ability to keep up its half of the bargain.

I agree with him that this is an incredibly important article. I encourage all my readers to take the whole thing in, and I challenge you to do so without getting emotional. By the time I had finished it, I had resolved to open a Science/Engineering Orphanage and somehow take in hundreds of children and raise them on STEM curriculum, then send them in droves to MIT and Stanford.

Disclosure: Ben Dueholm is my brother-in-law. Smartest thing he's ever written? Obviously his wedding vows to my sister.
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Back In My Day, Things Were More Cynical

2011-10-21T15:14:00.000-05:00

This is just the kind of epic nonsense that makes me use profanities on my blog.

I will say this directly to Mat Honan: if you can bitch about the recession that occurred when you graduated while simultaneously telling someone else not to bitch about the recession that is occuring when they graduate, you are a hypocritical asshole. Oh, and while you are trumpeting all your insanely awesome Gen X innovations like Google and Twitter (because a whole generation of people gets credit for the work of three people) let me point out that you are writing this on your tumblr (which was founded by a Millennial). Maybe we Millennials should also get credit for Groupon, Facebook, reddit, 4chan...I mean really do we want to have this fight? I don't think we do. Oh, and while you were perfecting all of musicdom you also produced this. I'll happily give credit where it is due for that.

Honestly, more of a response than this is beneath me.

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Not-Faster-Than-Light

2011-10-17T12:51:00.002-05:00

Back in September, I chided people for jumping on the FTL neutrino bandwagon, though I admitted that the facts might sway even me into the "Einstein was wrong" camp.

Unfortunately for hype-beasts, it appears Einstein wasn't wrong. Faster-than-light travel continues to be impossible.

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Peter Thiel's UTTER NONSENSE

2011-10-10T11:20:00.000-05:00

First, let me admit that I am really upset right now by what I read in Peter Thiel's article on the stagnation of technology called "The End of the Future." I am going to discuss it angrily, I admit, but please forgive me if this seems like a direct attack on Peter Thiel - I don't know him and I doubt if I did I would dislike him. He was, and is, a brilliant venture capitalist (more on that later) but I just really, really dislike what he wrote:

The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

Mr. Thiel, I have two degrees in science. Many of my friends have PhD's in science. I work at a research and development company, a not-for-profit, that specializes in not only cutting-edge research in life sciences, chemistry, and engineering, but also has several large government contracts to provide "subject matter experts" to them, which are essentially people whose specialized knowledge has no peer. At my company there are 140+ people with PhDs. There are 100+ more with at least a master of science degree.

And so with this large sample of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and coworkers I can assure you: we are not secret lawmakers. We are not politicians in disguise. In fact, politicians make us sick. The conservative conspiracy theorists that assume intelligent scientists have an agenda are only half correct: our 'agenda' is to increase the scientific knowledge available to our species. Our agenda is to vote against politicians who suggest Darwin was a fraud. Our aim is to secure as much government revenue for ourselves as we can, because our research has a proven track record of economic stimulus. Pointless wars, half a planet away, have done nothing for the economy other than help to cause the Great Recession of 2008 upon which your thesis is based.

Thiel then writes this:

In the past decade, the unresolved energy challenges of the 1970s have broadened into a more general commodity shock, which has been greater in magnitude than the price spikes of the two world wars and has undone the price improvements of the previous century. In the case of agriculture, at least, technological famine may lead to real old-fashioned famine.

Shouldn't we also talk about the grain subsidies for corn-based ethanol, championed by many an ill-informed (or self-preserving) politician, which have completely ruined the agricultural balanced system in this country? Shouldn't we point out that while ethanol remains an impossibly tiny contributer to the overall energy portfolio in America, the commodity shock due to the scarcity of corn-based feed for livestock has caused an outward flowing ripple in the food price system in this country that has had as great, if not greater, effect than the slowdown in crop yield acceleration he blames on poor innovation?

Thiel then writes this:

While innovation in medicine and biotechnology has not stalled completely, here too signs of slowed progress and reduced expectations abound. In 1970, Congress promised victory over cancer in six years’ time; four decades later, we may be 41 years closer, but victory remains elusive and appears much farther away.

Mr. Thiel makes no mention of cancer survival rate over this period, which has gone through the roof, if you will. It turns out that a Congressional promise of cancer cures is not the same thing as a doctor's promise of cancer cures (Thiel later acknowledges the abject lack of scientific knowledge in Congress). It also turns out that politicians are full of crap on many instances, and putting all of humanity's biotechnological progress on trial for the misstatements of 70's Senators is ridiculous, and utter nonsense.

Thiel then writes this:

If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity. And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress.

This is a fallacious argument. Meaningful technological progress has occurred for the last 30 years in the area of fuel efficiency and power in diesel locomotives. Currently, just a few engines can pull a quarter mile long, fully loaded, string of coal cars from Wyoming to Texas at a very high speed. I know this because they go right past my house, hulking monstrosities of American engineering wonder. And yet, this coal super-train capability cannot honestly be held responsible for economic prosperity. On the contrary, stronger diesel engines means less are necessary to pull a finite amount of coal, so fewer need to be built. Longer trains means less trains, which means less engineers driving them which means fewer jobs. Automation and traffic control of train/rail systems has streamlined efficiency and driven down margins, making coal-train-operation less profitable.
And to use Mr. Thiels words, and also in reverse: in the middle of the Great Recession of 2008, Apple released both the iPhone and the iPad, Google launched their Android OS that has become prevalent on many smartphones, and both Apple and Google (and their hardware manufacturers and their shareholders) have enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity. Further, saying "if economic progress, as measured by certain key indicators" is an unfair statement. Because it allows the writer (Mr. Thiel) or anyone else to choose whichever key indicators they want to make their point (I'll use one in a second). I could point to Apple's stock price as a key indicator. I could point to the 25% decrease in gas prices the last 3 months as a key indicator. I could point to the housing market collapse as a key indicator...of something.

Mr. Thiel then writes:

Economic progress may lag behind scientific and technological achievement, but 38 years seems like an awfully long time.

Indeed, most of Mr. Thiel's article seems to suggest that since 1973 we are no better, the economy is no stronger, and Americans are no better off. How can this be? Let's use a carefully selected key indicator, the GDP/population. In 1973 this would be $4.9 billion/ 211 million people = $23/person. Fast forward to 2010, and this becomes $42/person. According to this key indicator, every American is contributing basically twice as much to the economy, or stated a different way: the economy is twice as strong per unit of population.
Mr. Thiel then writes:

This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.

Wait, so it's technology that is to blame for the housing market crash? I cannot believe what utter nonsense this is. And if that is his point, then shouldn't he castigate himself a bit here? Thiel helped found PayPal in 1998, right in the midst of the Dotcom boom.

Mr. Thiel then writes:

The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth.

We are now in section six, page four of this essay and he has never given any evidence of a technology slowdown, in fact he has stated twice that a technological slowdown is nearly impossible to measure. I'm reading his article on a tablet PC, by the way. Which is receiving wireless internet from another room. Which is also connected to a flat screen TV and gives me ATT Uverse. Which is sent as photons through a fiber optic cable that can stretch hundreds of miles. Which is made of a super-pure form of glass in a clean room in a cutting edge manufacturing facility on another continent. Technology slowdown? Harumph.
Lastly, Mr. Thiel writes:

Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

Did he really just write that? I wish I'd started with this section of his essay, because it's clearly where he saved his best:

Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse.

So wait, are we supposed ignore that the hippy-elected, black President recently made the news for a $535 million loan to Solyndra, a solar energy company? It's almost like the hippies elected him for more than just the color of his skin. The thing is, I don't think there are many people left in America who don't acknowledge that in many ways, things are getting worse. But this article Mr. Thiel wrote was supposed to be about technology, not the public school system or criminal justice system or mass transit system or military industrial complex or foreign wars and torture at 'black' locations or the myriad of irrelevant-to-this-discussion topics where America is struggling.
Look, I do want to quote positively one thing Mr. Thiel wrote:

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects.

Sadly he is correct. While in large I disagree with him about technological progress - in my opinion the world is an amazing place filled with wonders that someone in 1973 could not have possibly imagined without the assistance of LSD - I do think that he is right about the Federal Government by and large hampering research and development, despite the existence of entities like the NIH and NSF. Many R&D projects are going to the the same companies, over and over, and the "military-industrial complex" label becomes appropriately applied.

One last thing: Mr. Thiel, I have this really great idea for a technology that would change modern medicine (and make you a boatload of money). I've built a working prototype at my kitchen table and proven it works to a few close friends. If you would be interested, I would love to talk to you about investment. Call me shameless, but seriously...do call me.

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Jobs Death, in his own words

2011-10-06T10:56:00.000-05:00

In 2005, he said:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

Squinting Into the Glaring Light of My Own Mortality

2011-10-05T22:19:00.001-05:00

We make big plans for ourselves. Well, some of us do.We get an idea in high school that consists of "you know what would be cool? If I were to ______" and then we slowly evolve from there. In college we major in engineering, because the desire to solve problems is like an addiction to us. Eventually we graduate with a box of parts in the trunk of our car and a broad but useless array of engineering fundamentals. Our diploma is a gatekey into some engineering firm or some startup where we tirelessly and meticulously build the world, or maintain it, or even develop means to destroy it. We toil, we think, we create, but mostly we fill out paperwork.We live comfortably in the upper middle class, retire comfortably, and raise healthy, balanced children. At the end of our 30 year careers, we look back on an array of projects in which we were integral, but replaceable, and we murmur to ourselves that our lives were significant because we made tangible contributions. We explain the complicated things to our grandchildren. We die loved and fondly remembered.

And then there are people like Steve Jobs. He was the engineer rock star. The Freddie Mercury of engineering.

The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tonight isn't because Steve Jobs is dead. I never met the man. I don't own an Apple product. My wife owns an iPod and I find the interface taxing. No, the sinking feeling in my stomach isn't for Jobs. It is the cry of my soul as it is reminded of its own fleeting mortality. "If the greatest engineer since Edison can die at a paltry 56 years," my soul worries, "then so too can I die one day." I'm only 29, I shouldn't have to worry about these things. But neither should a 56-year-old. The tragedy of life is that we don't get to choose when it starts, nor when it ends.

Update: What I wrote here about Steve Jobs' retirement seems particularly poignant, considering.

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AlphaBot

2011-10-03T07:38:00.000-05:00

The above video has been circulating amongst us engineers (and other nerd types) with awe and wonder. As is my nature (and because I am intimately familiar with many of Boston Dynamics projects) let me just drop this one grain of salt: notice the hydraulic and power lines leading up to the suspension system?
The thing is about as autonomous as a fetus. That's not to say that in the future it won't have on board power generation, compressors, hydraulic fittings, and computer systems. It just means that it won't be next week.

Some will remember BigDog, BD's last four legged robot. It ran autonomously, as this video (which inspired widespread fear of a robotic mule uprising) shows. So it certainly is possible to pack all the guts on the bot, instead of in the ceiling above it.

I guess my bottom line is "calm down, nerds! wait for 2.0!"

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Why I got two degrees in bioengineering.

2011-09-30T14:27:00.000-05:00

Because miracles are just one scientist away:

I, for one, embrace our Robot Scientist overlords.

2011-09-30T12:41:00.001-05:00

First off, Farhad Manjoo has posted a week-long series on robots entering more and more complex (read: high-paying) job markets, like robot pharmacists and robot lawyers. Some of the articles are quite good, and they all deserve at least a skim.
But today's article about computer scientists seems to me to fly directly into the face of empirical evidence also reported today by Jonah Lehrer:

The psychologists conducted their experiments on four and five-year-olds, so they had to be pretty simple. Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music when beads were placed on it. Half of the children saw a version of the toy in which the toy was only activated after four beads were exactingly placed, one at a time, on the top of the toy. This was the “unambiguous condition,” since it implied every bead is equally capable of activating the device. However, other children were randomly assigned to an “ambiguous condition,” in which only two of the four beads activated the toy. (The other two beads did nothing.) In both conditions, the researchers ended their demo with a question: “Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?”
Next came the exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads. One of the pairs was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play.
Here’s where the ambiguity made all the difference. Children who’d seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair. As a result, they were unable to figure out which beads activated the toy. (In fact, just one out of twenty children in that condition bothered performing the so-called “experiment”.) By contrast, nearly fifty percent of children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the beads and attempted to learn which specific beads were capable of activating the toy. The uncertainty inspired their empiricism.

The point here, is that what the robot lacks is curiosity. It doesn't go out and look for answers. It isn't "interested" in solving problems. Maybe if I asked the future super-powered scientist/robot of Manjoo's article to "explain climate change" it would chug away at climate data for a few weeks and then barf out an explanation, God be praised. But it doesn't sit there, in a lab, and suddenly think to itself "I wonder how climate change works?" And because of that, a sentient scientist will always be required. Maybe in the future scientists will become more like philosophers, and spend more time ruminating and coming up with questions. Then they'll hand the question over to the supercomputer, it'll go all Wolfram Alpha, and then the scientists can get busy trying to sort out the implications of the answer. Less lab book time and more time for creative thinking won't diminish the work of scientists, it will elevate it. Because its not like 350 years ago scientists said "I don't understand this gravity thing" and then Newton explained it and they all threw up their hands and declared their careers obsolete and went and became plumbers. Asking questions, finding an answer, then asking more questions based on that answer is the fundamental scientific process of humanity, and until we have a computer that can embrace ambiguity and synthesize its own curiosity...human scientists will remain pivotal...regardless of how quickly a computer can derive equations.

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A Quick Point about the Kindle Fire

2011-09-28T11:55:00.000-05:00

A lot of people are trumpeting as one of its features "that are better than the iPad 2" the fact that it weighs 14.6 ounces and the iPad 2 weights 21.6 ounces. It causes me intestinal distress to defend an Apple product, but...

Size of Kindle Fire screen: 7"
Size of iPad 2 screen: 10"
Ratio: .70

Weight of Kindle fire: 14.6 oz
Weight of iPad 2: 21.6 oz
Ratio: .68

Any questions? There is no miniaturization breakthrough here, just product shrinkage.

My personal opinion? The reason I got a Kindle was because the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes when I am reading at 1 am after a long day at the office. I wanted a tablet to replace my computer but knew it wouldn't replace my books. I wanted a Kindle to replace my books but knew it wouldn't replace my computer. The Kindle Fire is straddling a barbed wire fence, at its own peril.

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Christian Death Mongers

2011-09-28T08:02:00.000-05:00

Hitch hates Christianity, this much is known. But here he really takes a stab at American Christianity as the reason the Death Penalty survives in America:

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.) Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye. (You might wish to look up the chapter of Exodus in which that stipulation occurs: it is as close to sheer insane ranting and wicked babble as might well be wished, and features the famous ox-goring and witch-burning code on which, one sometimes fears, too much of humanity has been staked.)

Sullivan linked to it, then he got this absolutely brilliant reader response, which I am pasting in full:

In 2010, as far as I can tell, these five states executed the most people:
1. China (2000+)
2. Iran (252+)
3. North Korea (60+)
4. Yemen (53+)
5. USA (46+)
Two of the top three entities are explicitly atheist. Hitch's assertion that we can ignore Chinese executions because they are a "very nervous oligarchy" can easily be used for Iran considering, you know, they actually have a demonstrable REASON to be nervous - the 2009 protests/Green Movement, hostile relationship with the world's only superpower, etc - and because any analyst of Iran worth his salt will tell you that their government is an extremely Byzantine oligarchy, not a true dictatorship. In other words, you don't get to throw China out and retain the Iranians while making this argument. Yemen is a barely functioning state of tribes. Surprise.
As for us, maybe "God" has something to do with it. But I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest something risky: perhaps it has more to do with a very particular brand of Protestant Christian theology than it does with "God".
I didn't see Hitch accounting for ultra-Catholic South America, where Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have explicitly abolished the death penalty. There are also a handful of countries that have de facto abolished the practice, having not carried out an execution for at least the last two decades: Dominica (1986), El Salvador (1973), Grenada (1978), Jamaica (1988), Peru (1979), Suriname (1982), Brazil (1876). Most of these nations retain the death penalty for possible use in cases like treason or crimes against humanity. Somehow one of the most religious continents in the world seems to have escaped Hitch's sight.
I get it. Hitch hates God. But this seems like a classic case of him beginning with his own very well-known assumptions and then hastily assembling the best argument he can make to support it. Religious conservatives will always point to communist dictatorships. Liberal atheists will point to religious theocracies. Both are capable of great evil. You don't need to believe in God to murder. And just because you believe in God doesn't preclude you from being a murderer. More than anything, it is just simply absolutism in something that deludes people into murder.

I don't really have anything to add to that, other than that the death penalty is expensive and ineffective, like so many other government institutions that the GOP argues should be abolished. But you almost never hear them argue for abolishing the expensive, ineffective practice of killing criminals.

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Terra Nova S01E01 and S01E02 Review

2011-09-27T08:27:00.000-05:00

Somehow a scientist has created a "crack" in the fabric of the universe that leads back 85 million years ago to a much younger Earth. Okay, so when people go through the time portal, it's apparently a one way trip, with no way back. How do they know what is on the other side of the portal? At one point they show a "probe" they sent through first, remarking (in order to silence time travel critics like myself) that after sending the probe back 85 million years, they could not find it in the present (2149 AD) which led them to believe the past was a "different time stream." Well fine, pull a Star Trek.
Nevertheless, they warn travelers about to go through the portal that "the high oxygen levels on the other side (part of the reason insects and dinosaurs could get so big was that the atmospheric oxygen level in the Cretaceous period was much higher than it is in the current Neogene period) but how did they know this? Once again I ask: how did they know what was on the other side of the portal? Remember in the movie Stargate when they send a robot through the portal and try to track where it goes?
Some of the science and background in this show has been great; they completely kneecapped time travel critics when they proposed an alternative timeline. Most of the dinosaurs I've seen in the show are contemporary; shows involving dinosaurs often make the mistake of picking and choosing neat-looking/plot convenient dinosaurs at random while those dinosaurs might have lived on different continents or millions of years apart.

But here's the problem I really had: by my count they unloaded nearly 2,000 rounds at or into the attacking carnivorous dinosaurs in these two episodes and yet not a single dinosaur died, or even showed signs of injury. Were dinosaurs effectively bullet-proof? And if they were, why bother sending the "pilgrims" back with bullet-based weapons? Why not send them with tasers, RPGs and tanks or whatever it takes to bring down a Carnotaur? At one point in the episode, two characters unloaded fully-automatic assault rifles from a range of less than twenty feet at a dinosaur that stood roughly 7 feet tall. The dinosaur turned and fled, apparently unharmed by mere bullets.
Now, I'm willing to accept for the sake of this show's admittedly absurd plot that these dinosaurs have really thick skin. But five minutes after these two characters fail to stop the dinosaur with hundreds of bullets, another character mentions using tranquilizer guns. If a point-blank-range bullet will not penetrate the skin of a dinosaur, neither will a sub-sonic tranquilizer dart.
I realize that they can't think of everything when making a show, and when it comes to scifi shows (that over the last decade have shown an increasing special effects budget at the price of good writing) its hard to vet every single bit of every single episode. Nevertheless, the seeming bullet-proof aspect of the dinosaurs really bothers me, because the hulking, slow dinosaurs would have otherwise provided the "pilgrims" with a great source of protein. As the armored vehicle was being chased across a field with a Carnotaur right behind it (let's ignore the impossible biomechanics of a 50 mph dinosaur), unloading .50 BMG rounds into it from a turret and a dinosaur finally went down, I thought "that Carnotaur is going to be DELICIOUS!" and then the Carnotaur got back up, miraculously, and continued the chase.

That kind of firepower should cut through the engine of an armored vehicle. Not killing a 2-ton dinosaur with them is pretty stupid.

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Universal Health Care For Wealthy Androids

2011-09-26T08:03:00.000-05:00

Let me ask you something. Consider a future scenario in which:
1) Robotics, nanotech, and human-machine-interface technology had sufficiently advanced to a point where we could upload our consciousness into solid-state memory and become Intelligent androids. This process is really expensive, and
2) Replacement parts, double redundant backup of your memory (aka brain), upgrades, etc are all readily available to enable your android self to achieve immortality. However these things are also really expensive.

In short, immortality and complete freedom from health issues is now possible...but expensive. Would you say that only the wealthy deserved the right to become immortal? Do you think that the middle class and poor should be resigned to normal mortal ills like cancer and gum disease and tetanus while the wealthy look on with timeless, perfect, robotic eyes? It seems like the right thing to do is to have the wealthy be required to subsidize the immortalization of the poor, for everyone's benefit. Right? Society would be maximally benefitted from maximum numbers of immortals; that's a huge number of productive workers paying income and capital gains taxes! Forever! So I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone - and I mean everyone except the rich - would want to tax the rich to subsidize the immortalization of the poor.

Now let's try another scenario:
1) Medicine has advanced to a point at which you can take a "universal cure pill" that, if taken once a month, will cure every ill in your body, flushing out cancer, plaque (both tooth and arterial), etc. thus maximizing your health, and
2) the universal cure pill is really expensive.

Would it really benefit society if only the rich were able to cure their ills in this convenient way? Would society really be tolerant to the idea that the middle class and/or poor would need to suffer through conventional medical treatment (or no treatment at all)? The case for immortalization was more obvious; an ethical society wouldn't let the rich live forever while the poor died in piles. But this is simply a less extreme case of the same thing. The rich would be afforded a level of health care that pushed them as close as a human could go to immortality, while the poor would be doomed to mortal ills. Ancient wealthy would go skydiving while poor people half their age suffered through dementia and died. Yet if the society subsidized the universal cure pill, everyone could achieve the stratospheric health for their entire lives. People could have 80-120 year careers, and pay income taxes that whole time!

Eventually you could imagine these scenarios backwards from the future until you arrive at present day, where a high level of medical care is available if you can afford it. If you can't, you die. And yet, the wealthy in this country seem to see their subsidization of health care for the poor as an affront to their personal liberty. And bad for the country. And an enabler of laziness in the lower classes.
But in the case of immortality via Singularity, or near-immortality via super-drugs, the argument seems pretty clear to me: the more healthy people we have in this country the more the country benefits. Why is this so hard to accept in the present tense?

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Faster-Than-Light

2011-09-23T12:24:00.001-05:00

If tau neutrinos could travel faster than light, then we should be able to regularly measure them doing that from a constant source of tau neutrinos - like the Sun. Except, we never have.

The news quickly latched onto this finding with claims "interstellar hyperspeed travel is once again a possibility." Oh please. A neutrino has almost zero mass, so the energy required (E = mC^2) is relatively minor, in fact neutrinos traveling much slower than light speed is pretty weird.

A little background on neutrinos: they're pretty poorly understood. The mass has never been measured, but it was previously assumed they had zero mass which would mean they would only travel at the speed of light and no slower. However they've been found to wobble between "flavors" blah blah blah they're really damn light but still have a tiny mass. Interestingly, if neutrino mass is higher than about 1.5 eV, then Dark Matter cannot exist.

But going back to the idea that neutrinos can zip along at a speed faster than light seems doubtful to me. Nevertheless, let's pretend its true. It changes nothing for massive humans and their monstrously heavy starships. The energy required to send an essentially-massless particle at or above the speed of light compared to the energy required to get Luke Skywalker to the Degoba System is like the size of a single atom compared to the size of the Universe. Literally.

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Trivial Savings

2011-09-22T13:04:00.000-05:00

Here, John Dabiri suggests vertical-axis wind turbines are much safer for birds and migratory bats:

Big [horizontal] turbine blades have long been blamed for bird and bat kills. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency officials are investigating what happened to six golden eagles found dead last month near a 3-year old wind farm near Tehachapi, Calif. The agency estimates windmills kill a half million birds a year, however the American Wind Energy Association, an industry group, disputes those figures. Dabiri says 30-foot vertical windmills are much less dangerous since they don't use propeller-like blades to capture wind, but rotating open-framed cylinders.
"These smaller windmills are below migratory levels for birds and bats," Dabiri said. "It can be a real game changer.

I don't mean to pick on Professor Dabiri, but horizontal windmills aren't really an existential threat to any species of animal. I realize minimizing the lethal effects of wind farms is important. But if "changing the game" in regards to animal deaths due to human activity is really a concern, maybe we should really change the game and ban windows on buildings. And then write building code that requires a soft layer of padding on the outside of every building.
Because while Dabiri brags about potentially saving 500,000 birds/bats a year...nearly 1 BILLION die from hitting buildings every year. And that's just in the United States. So for every bird killed by a wind mill...2,000 are killed by buildings.

But let's concentrate on the safety of wind turbines.

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Innovation and Harry Potter

2011-09-18T15:47:00.000-05:00

Surely J.K. Rowling didn't realize she was an innovator when she imagined the magic portraits of Harry Potter's universe. But nevertheless, the feasibility of a magic, animated portrait that can interact with real humans approacheth. Wednesday night Mrs. TAE and I saw Harry Potter 8, or Deathly Hallows Part 2 or whatever the last damn movie was called, and I enjoyed it. The epilogue was awkward and terrible, but the rest of it was tense and good, if a bit (necessarily) brief and topical.

Nevertheless, when I watched HP, Ron and Hermione sneak into Hogwarts through a passage behind a magic, animated portrait of Dumbledore's long-dead sister, I couldn't help but think "animated portraits would be pretty easy and would require no magic."

Animated portrait basics:
1) The first part is a thin LCD screen with sufficiently high resolution to show a nice image. Those currently-sold digital picture frames are pretty crappy. Give me 1080p at least.
2) Using a facial motion capture system, get an animated layout of a person's face as they go through a 2 minute barrage of expressions.
3) Using simple feedback AI, like a chatbot, interact with people when they walk up to the portrait.
4) When no one is "at" the portrait, have the character just sort of go through a repeating animated cycle of...whatever.

Pretty much done. As long as the person viewing the portrait didn't ask something to complicated, the animated portrait could do a decent job of responding. And as chatbots get smarter every day, eventually an animated portrait could pass the Turing test and...well yikes.

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An Unnecessary Defense of Lutheran Pastor Benjamin Dueholm

2011-09-17T13:23:00.000-05:00

Of course, I've covered monogamy here at TAE several times, mostly from the standpoint that the tribal culture of our early species, combined with the long gestational period, seems to indicate to me that monogamy was probably the preferred (though admittedly not always followed) sexual construct for our species tens of millennia ago. Typically when I write those posts Ben will chime in that even if I'm wrong it doesn't matter because humans have free will and can choose monogamy anyway.
Here, Ben wrote about Dan Savage's no-nonsense approach to his sex advice column. Read it. Here, Joe Carter points to the Dueholm piece as evidence of the decline of the liberal church, or America, or Western Civilization, or whatever even worse thing exists that can decline because of liberal (and there for sexually-devious, obviously) preachers and their coordinated attack on the Church's teachings.

Disclosure: Ben Dueholm is my brother-in-law. Further disclosure: I have contributed to the Lutheran e-zine that Dueholm edits when he isn't perpetrating a shadowy war on Christian Ethics.

And because of my close relationship with him, I can share all the intimate details of this rogue's depraved marriage ethic and the faithless way he disparages monogamous relationships with every exhale of his toxic breath. Unfortunately there aren't any. I have not one example of a time when Ben has chosen a path other than monogamy, and knowing my sister as well as I do, I must admit that he's probably been tempted. Together thy have raised a delightful, intelligent child, and take another under their roof in foster care, where she has thrived. All part of Ben's plan, obviously, to indoctrinate a stranger's child in his perverse sense of Christian values.

Obviously I kid. What Mr. Carter is missing is a sense of history. A couple millennia ago, the Bible made it totally clear that Jesus would return any minute and get busy with his sword of justice. And yet it didn't happen. Revelation was re-read a little less strictly, and the Church survived. A couple centuries ago, the Bible made it patently clear and obvious that the Earth was a flat rectangle around which the sun faithfully spun. And yet scientific progress sort of blew that one up. The Old Testament interpretations were loosened, and somehow the Church survived. 150 years ago Darwin took a shot across the bow of Genesis, and the liberals embraced a new version of Christianity, where the lesson of Genesis, but not the word, was important. And somehow the Church survived. Then some liberal mainline churches decided to let women preach. What an atrocity! And yet the Church survived. Now the free-thinking liberals are trying to destroy the Puritanical monogamy (that has worked so well for Catholics, right?), and Carter seems to think that if they succeed then the Church will suffer or flat out disappear. I humbly submit that Carter needs to relax. The Church has survived for hundreds and hundreds of years, despite the vile, bellicose undermining that Ben is clearly guilty of.

Then there is the fact that Mr. Carter is flat out wrong. I live in Kansas, in the suburbs of Kansas City. My state finally managed to drive out the last cursed Democrat from Congress, now we bask in the purity of our ultra-conservative GOP Senators, GOP Representatives, and GOP Governor. Evolution is continually barraged with attacks, and the Governor is doing everything he can to ban abortion (another evil that somehow destroys liberal mainline churches).
And yet, the three largest churches in the area are all liberal mainliners. They embrace and support their gay members, some going so far as to allow gay clergy! Blasphemy! Shouldn't these churches be declining? Or disappearing? Instead they are spreading, creating "branch locations" which quickly fill their pews, as Christians flock to hear their message that seems to say "worry about your own Christianity before you start judging others."

I guess I should write some catchy, witty conclusion to this but I really don't have one. The point is that when people try to subjugate their peers into matching their opinions or suggest they be banished...they always lose that fight. When you embrace the diversity of the opinions of the human race - you grow.

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Transhumanism

2011-09-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

io9 asks: "Where do you stand on the subject of human enhancement?" By this they mean do you believe it is ethical to give someone a brain implant that gives them direct access to wikipedia, as an arbitrary example.

Such a question is on par with asking "where do you stand on the subject of smartphones?" And by that I mean "smartphones are here, your opinion is irrelevant to the inundation of culture with the technology. It's here, its not going anywhere. The penetration of (insert technology here) will only increase.

Because lets be honest with ourselves. Human enhancement went from zero to hero with the advent of wireless internet access. Honestly wireless transfer of data will be looked back on as the greatest innovation of the 20th Century, of that I have no doubt. The internet was great, it connected us all, contained an exponentially growing volume of human knowledge, but really when we could carry it in our pocket - anywhere - is when it really unleashed its potential. I can know almost anything, almost anywhere, with a few clicks on my phone. For 30 bucks a month. "You can't get everything on the internet," you argue. Well actually I just asked my Wolfram Alpha app and it told me that in fact, I can get 98% of everything ever on my phone. So there.

The point is human augmentation isn't a moment, its a process. And the process is so completely amongst us already arguing it as a standalone concept isn't really germane, at least not anymore. If we want to discuss ethics and human augmentation, we need to talk about the ethics of keeping it capitalistic. Because obviously the rich kids will get the cool implants first. And its a pretty slippery slope between that and having Double Plus Alphas and Epsilon Minuses, based on how much money your parents had when you are born.
Of course this quickly digresses into a sci-fi novel, right? But we live in the sci-fi novel our parents read, and not even Wells could imagine a smartphone.

In any case, I built myself a 2 milliamp transcranial direct current stimulator that runs a sub-lethal applied current across my prefrontal cortex and out my primary motor cortex. Sometimes I use it at work, and if literature is right then its responsible for the incredible rate of speed at which I am learning to code in Objective-C. When I get the implantable version done I'll let you know. It'll be restrictively expensive, but then again, all cool new gadgets should be.

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Materialism Becomes Moralism

2011-09-13T13:31:00.000-05:00

I see a young man, about 25, wearing ripped-knee-levis and a graphic t-shirt that references an 80's cult classic movie via a humorous quote. He's got Chucks on his feet and white earbuds hanging out of his ears. He is wearing a knit stocking cap slightly askew and too loosely to actually provide thermal insulation. In short, he is cool. He strolls down the street, preoccupied with the Grace Potter's cover of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."
At an intersection he stops and waits for the "walk" sign. Next to him, and elderly woman drags two bags of groceries. Spotting her, he reaches out and touches her arm, then asks "how far am I carrying these for you?" She gives him the groceries and then takes his arm and he helps her across the street. People smile as they see the two, though bystanders cannot possibly know if the young man and the old woman are related. At her front steps, he gives her the groceries, and a hug, and continues on his way, though switching to some Eddie and the Tide song from The Lost Boys soundtrack.

What I envision is a counter-counterculture, where the coolness that my generation derives from materialism has been augmented by a coolness derived from moralism. How to create this scenario is not something I can possibly describe here; I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of how coolness and charity could be parallel but also how can we possibly create this world, given the skepticism of young people to buy into the idealist bullcrap that people like Bono hypocritically trumpet?
I dunno, yet. I really don't. But if saving the world was easy, we'd have done it already.

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Reminder: The Climate is Broken

2011-09-07T19:00:00.000-05:00

Here's the usual "scientists complaining that changing environmental conditions might cause changes in animal populations":

The research team [is] worried for Echinoderms — animals like sea urchins and starfish that Smith says constitute a significant portion of the seafloor life on the Antarctic shelf — which have disappeared from regions inhabited by the crabs, and will likely continue to be wiped out if the crabs continue to colonize new areas of the shelf.

Apparently the ocean is getting warmer and now the giant (and might I say delicious-looking!) crabs are invading previously-too-cold areas and trampling the local flora and gobbling the local fauna. Which I am sure is unfortunate for the locals.
Nevertheless, I repeat the mantra I have preached time and time again: whether anthropogenic climate change is true or natural cyclical climate change is true or cosmic ray-induced climate change is true...the common denominator of all the above is that climate change is happening. So while I lament whenever human introduced invasive species wreak havoc, like giant anacondas taking on gators in Florida or asian carp kamikazes on the Missouri River, the tendency of warm-water crabs to move into new regions that now exist because the water is warming is a little less ignominious.

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I Wasn't Alive During World War II

2011-09-07T08:48:00.000-05:00

I woke up, that Tuesday morning, about 8 am (CST). I remember getting up and brushing my teeth then going to Zac's room (I lived at a fraternity house; I was a sophomore in college) to watch a little Sportscenter before I showered and headed to class. When I got to Zac's room, he did not have Sportscenter on. Maybe he had ESPN on, but what was on his TV was not sports. It was calamity.
Later that afternoon, full of rage, I drove with a pledge brother to the recruiting station in town to enlist. It was closed, and I later calmed down and decided to finish college.
A few months later, I remember watching the Super Bowl with a bunch of friends and the Rams fans in the room were complaining that "this thing is fixed...like they'll let a team named "THE PATRIOTS" lose after 9/11!"

You know, I was born in 1982. World War II was 40 years in the past. Vietnam was more than a decade ago. American culture had, to be sure, been fundamentally shaped by these two events. But not me. I never sat glued to a radio listening to Roosevelt, never watched Nixon disappear into that helicopter.
This disconnection from the past's current events is evident in my continued call for catharsis at NASA. I never watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon and so he is not a hero to me. In my lifetime, Neil Armstrong has been a wizened public figure from a bygone era constantly begging the Federal government for more Moon missions, and nothing more. Sure, the stories of my grandfather, navigator in a B-25 during WWII are thrilling and interesting. But they are someone else's stories.

My daughter was born on October 25, 2007. As such, she will never know the feeling of sitting in a room expecting to see the highlights from Monday Night Football on TV only to find images of New York City in ruin. It will all be disconnected from her, part of her cultural heritage but not part of her personal psyche.

And that's probably for the best. I seriously doubt any parent or grandparent actively wishes their progeny would better understand them by having suffered the same terrible epochs of human history that they had to endure.
If anything, I wish that no terrible event will occur during my daughter's lifetime. This is not because I wish to spare her the awful feelings of confusion and rage I felt that terrible day and the days afterward. It is because once you have suffered your lens gets cloudy and the objectivity you previously enjoyed is forever gone. When my child looks back on the first decade of the new millennium, I want her to be critical of us. I don't want her to empathize and say "well, you had suffered, so the torture of detainees, the keeping people in secret prisons and refusal to let them see lawyers, the waterboarding, the drone attacks on American citizens, the illegal hacking of people's phones and email, the racism towards American muslims, the hyped up but obviously porous security, the radicalization of the Right and complacency of the Left, and the Empire-building interventionism are understandable." I don't want her to understand. I want her to look me in the face and ask my why I didn't do more to calm people down. Why I got swept up in the post-9/11 fervor like everyone else. I won't have an answer for her, other than "I was young, and stupid."

What's your excuse?

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Job Growth

2011-09-02T10:35:00.000-05:00

Look at all the white people at this job fair.

Image found here.
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Double Down

2011-09-02T07:19:00.000-05:00

Sharon Weinberger is doing some incredible work over at Danger Room. Know outrage.

It was time for a change, Pentagon officials thought. In 2010, they had just wrested control of a $1 billion contract to train Afghan policemen from the Pentagon, and they thought the work should go to Xe Services, the infamous private security firm formerly known as Blackwater.
The deal, an umbrella-style contract, would come from an unlikely, obscure Army bureau called the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, or CNTPO, that brings new tech to foreign allies’ counternarcotics efforts.
One problem: The new task slotted into the CNTPO contract — known as an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract — had nothing to do with counternarcotics or technology. Afghan police needed training in basic skills like shooting straight and controlling riots.
But the CNTPO contract, first awarded in 2005, was already held by Blackwater and four other companies. Using it meant the Pentagon could slip Blackwater into the training job — and avoid holding a new full-and-open competition.
Another problem: Rival security firm DynCorp already held the existing training contract, which was run out of the State Department, not CNTPO or any other Pentagon arm. DynCorp didn’t want to give up its lucrative training business. But since DynCorp wasn’t among the five companies that held the CNTPO award, it couldn’t even compete for the work it was already performing.

Stop Being Okay With Patience, Ctd Ctd

2011-09-01T12:38:00.001-05:00

In a relevant post, Sharon Weinberger points a damning finger at sole-source government contracts.

The Air Force planned to award a multibillion-dollar contract for a new tanker, based on the Boeing 767, as a “sole source” — meaning there would be no opportunity for a formal competition. The unusual lease-to-own deal would have cost the Defense Department approximately $37 billion, according to one government estimate.
But the tanker lease contract never went through. The deal derailed after it came to light that Darleen Druyun, a senior Air Force official involved with the tanker negotiations, had also conducted job talks with Boeing’s then–chief financial officer, breaking federal conflict-of-interest laws. Almost 10 years later, Boeing won the tanker contract — this time, in a full and open competition.
The nearly decade-long tanker battle is typically viewed as a fiasco. But taxpayers actually benefited from it. According to EADS, Boeing’s European rival, the competition saved the Air Force $16 billion by driving down Boeing’s offer price. The Air Force, for its part, says that it got a 20 percent cost reduction from Boeing by holding competition, which still places the savings in the billions of dollars.

But even worse, here's this little quotelet:

"The vast majority of the dollars on sole source contracts are simply follow-ons to large contracts,” said Jacques Gansler, who served as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics from 1997 to 2001."

If you've been following this thread you'd understand how absurd this sounds. A company that won a mega-contract gets a second even larger (continuation) mega contract without any competition.

It's not like Sharon and I are the only people who realize this is a problem, either:

Competition helps in a lot of ways, ranging from price to quality, according to Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight. “If you know somebody else can step in, it acts as an incentive for the incumbent to do good, because the next contract could be awarded to someone else,” he told Danger Room. “To play the skeptic, if you know no one else is out there, will the contractor be performing at 110 percent?”

But the problem isn't solved just by making competition for the contract competitive. There really does need to be a heavier incentive to complete the tasks of the contract in the given time and budget. One way to increase the incentive is to increase the penalty for failure.

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Stop Being Okay With Patience, Ctd

2011-09-01T09:50:00.001-05:00

Got a great comment this morning: "Your post was awesome and eye opening. I agreed with it completely but your recommendation for the penalty was maybe too harsh. I think the risk vs reward ratio would be too high for companies because you'd essentially bankrupt them if they failed at a large project."
Of course, I'm not the ultimate authority on the ideal way to structure effective government-funded R&D. The specifics of my proposal should be ignored in content but not in principal: the lack of punishment for failure decouples the worry an innovator might normally have about his/her success.
Think about it: let's say the government funded a project to create a new super-awesome Humvee. In a worst case scenario currently, the company that won the contract would have their funding cut off early because they failed to meet mid-program deliverables. In the best case scenario they finish the program with a new SuperHumvee they can sell in quantity. But once again, there is no "punishment" beyond having your paychecks cut off if the company fails to meet deadlines.

This seems comical if you look at it from the outside. The government wants something, a company proposes to give it to them, the government pays that company money, and then the company isn't really legally/financially penalized if they don't deliver the government anything. And then the company asks for more money. Honestly it seems incredibly unethical. But its normal!

Maybe the commenter is right: a 364% penalty for failure might be too high. But what about a 25% penalty? If a company wins a contract they either fulfill it to the letter or they pay back all the money plus a quarter of the contract value. That $75 million DARPA contract either gets fullfilled or you pay DARPA $94 million back with a letter of apology and the publicized humiliation of being a failure.

I really don't think this would endanger government-funded R&D. People will always bid on projects. But right now there is this plague in the system where industry seems intent on winning follow-on work, which basically requires a project to not be complete. It's like there is an unspoken goal, both on the contractor side as well as the government side that "follow-on work" will occur if the project goes well. This simply shouldn't be the case.

This is what I mean by "stop being okay with patience." The Government needs to lose its patience with contractor cheekiness. And the American taxpayer needs to lose patience with government projects that sound glamorous but never yield anything but perpetual industrial stimulus.

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Stop Being Okay With Patience

2011-08-31T22:13:00.000-05:00

The trouble with innovations is that the really cool ones are perpetually light years away. This presents itself in two facets.
1) Vaporware is perpetually in the extremely early stages of R&D, like fusion power, connecting human nerve cells to computers directly, faster than light travel, and teleportion.

2) When a cool innovation is proposed the time line before we'll see it on the market is always 5+ years, aka "impossibly far in the future."

And yet, people seem to be okay with this. Take this announcement on MSNBC about "spacesuits of the future" being developed by a consortium of MIT and Draper Lab (aka MIT for post-docs) for NASA:

Duda's Draper Lab group has partnered on the project with scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They plan to first create a prototype for a spacesuit arm by 2012, with funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

If success attracts continued funds, Duda said, a full-body wearable suit could become a reality within a decade — easily within the time frame for NASA's plans targeting the asteroids, Mars and beyond.

Within a decade? They're overtly admitting they want to bilk Federal dollars for a decade at best. And see how they carefully veil the fact that NASA's "next big thing" is even farther into the future?

Am I the only one that gets SUPER chagrined at this? It means I'll likely turn 40, my entire "thirties" having gone by while they worked on this. Assuming the funding isn't killed. And its really only an incremental innovation. Then there are other timelines for major research projects that make my teeth hurt:
- The Joint Strike Fighter program started more than 15 years ago.
- The powered exoskeleton program DARPA funded in 2001 ran for 7 years then quietly ended with no usable prototypes. The only working unit, the Sarcos XOS, is still in early stage development.
- NASA's search for a new orbital delivery system has been ongoing for two decades.

One might say that I am impatient with the status quo rate of innovation in this country. The seeming perpetuity of government-funded research and development leads a cynic to conclude that these projects are not meant to have an end, rather they are a means to transfer taxpayer dollars into industrial stimulus. Can you imagine if a project manager at a company spent $75 million company dollars, but did not meet the project goals and did not delivering a single thing at the end? That PM would have his/her head on a platter. And their box of belongings with them as they were shown the door and their keycard was deactivated. But on the contrary, can you imagine a project manager that managed to bilk a customer out of $75 MEEELLION dollars and at the end didn't actually have to meet the goals they had outlined in the proposal nor deliver anything to the customer? That PM would be heralded by the company as a genius.
That's the rub, isn't it? Fast innovation...the kind with high risk and high reward...is fraught with peril. Lengthy, open-ended government projects are ripe with fee and more fee. And the best thing about a big government contract is you can dump all the risky work on subcontractors and they not only strengthen your proposal by giving you "a small business plan" but you collect fee on what they do too, just for overseeing them. And so government-led innovation, sadly, is counterproductive.

Unless, of course, the deliverable of the funded work is harder to achieve, and the contractor risk is higher. For instance, what if instead of DARPA spending $75M on the exoskeleton project and at the end not really having much expectation other than "maybe the Army will continue your funding" they had instead told Sarcos/Raytheon "here's $150 million. You have 5 years to deliver 20 working, production-quality exoskeletons. If at the end of the 5 years you do not deliver the prototypes then you will immediately pay back the $150 million under the same pay schedule as an IRS tax payment: the full tax burden owed, plus an immediate 16% fee, plus 6% compounded interest for each month. Essentially Sarcos would either get a check for $150 million or they'd owe the government $564 million. Their reward is compounded as well, though. Under a successful project, they'd come away with twice as much money, plus they'd stand to be the sole company on Earth capable of producing Iron Man.

The government could fund competing projects more effectively this way. What if, when they funded Lockheed and Boeing to build a Joint Strike Fighter prototype, the winner got the contract but the loser got penalized? As in the government said "you each get $750 million and 5 years to have a new supersonic fighter capable of VTOL. Which ever one has better scores on the following 10 metrics wins the contract. The other has to pay the government $2.8 billion in penalties." Can you imagine it? The incentive to not lose is massive. But I digress. And I am not so naive as to think the puppets that fund projects like this are willing to iceberg a major military-industrial corporation. Too many voters work at (insert military-industrialist corporation with branch offices in 100+ Congressional districts), if you catch my drift.

In any case, the bottom line remains the same: funding agencies and the general public have way too much tolerance for long time lines.

Sometimes when I argue this with my friends, I'll come around to "why should we have to wait 15 years for the development of (insert vaporware example here)?" and they give me this bull-crap cop out "if you don't like it, do something about it." Do I tell a teacher complaining about NCLB that they should be able to fix the whole system? Do I tell someone who complains about American politics that they should run for office? No, I don't. When a problem is systemic it cannot be mitigated by the actions of a single person. It needs a system-wide change. And in this case, a little less patience with the process might not be so bad.

There is good news, potentially. If and when the economy recovers to a sufficient degree, there will be a tidal wave of Boomers who retire and analysts suggest that venture capital will surge. So the private R&D industry might be one we shouldn't underestimate in the next 10 years while that new spacesuit is being developed.

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A World of Steve Jobses

2011-08-30T13:14:00.000-05:00

The knee-jerk reaction whenever some technoceleb makes it big is to try to examine every facet of his/her life and see how young persons can potentially emulate those things. The implication is that "if I am like Steve Jobs, my career and revenue stream will also be like Steve Jobs."

This is a dangerous habit, and a difficult one to break. Firstly, its dangerous because Steve Jobs brilliance is more than a little in his uniqueness, and trying to copy a man whose career thrived due to his individuality is paradoxical and...foolhardy. Second, this tendency to want children to be genius-facsimiles is a difficult habit to break because people are greedy and they want their kids to be filthy stinking rich and famous. This has been true since time began. And copying the successful endeavors of a rich person seems a great way, time and time again, for achieving filthy stinking richness.

But, truly I tell you that the success of Steve Jobs and so many technocelebs before him was entirely independent on their emulation of their predecessors. Really, what Steve Jobs is would be more in line with lottery winners than anything else. Because honestly there were zillions of nerds geeking out with computers in the late 70's but only a few became Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. And honestly, dropping out of college after one semester isn't statistically a sure-fire way to end up rich (nor something sane parents encourage in their children). It just happened that Jobs had Wozniak, and that he had good timing. I am not meaning to downplay the obvious brilliance of Jobs. Merely, I am trying to highlight that there are tons of brilliant people at any given moment in human history and it's only in hindsight that we see the "winners."

So, parents: if you are hell-bent for leather on raising a technoceleb here's my advice. Teach your child to be an individual. Teach them to be diversely-capable. Teach them to draw doodles and to play in the sand. Take them to science museums, sure, but art museums too. Teach them to do sports, but only one or two night a week. Let them be average at math and science (it won't matter later). Most importantly, don't sweat details. Work on these five traits: questioning, experimenting, observing, associating and networking. Don't teach them to be like anyone. Teach them to be bold and risky and to make a new template for success.

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Steve Jobs, Retired

2011-08-30T09:47:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of things I could say about him. Because of this, I'm going to write two entries about him. This one is about (as alluded to by the above Eminiem video) the fact that Steve Jobs rightly deserves a giant sign above his mega-mansion that says "I told you so!"
How Jobs determined his path forward once he left his India-buddhist-sojourn only he can ever really know. But he knew it, to be sure. And he never once slowed down. The naysayers, myself included, scoffed at Apple products, but the shareholders reaped the rewards as consumers gobbled (and continue to gobble) up Apple products like candy.
We kept waiting for the man to run out of ideas, or to produce a crappy product everyone hated, but it never materialized. He departs, as Royce raps in the above video "I'll stop when I'm at the very top."

One thing we focus on here at work in regards to innovation is that an innovative idea needs a "champion" for it to survive and hopefully thrive. In that, Jobs was the ultimate champion for Apple products.

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The Abstracted Engineer reviews: The Passage, by Justin Cronin

2011-08-29T13:40:00.000-05:00

First, I really enjoyed this book; it was entertaining. I am looking forward to the sequel. Right off the bat, I'd score it a 7 out of 10. That said, there are two major problems I had with it that I kept thinking about during reading. Also, I assume by reading this you don't mind spoilers. If you do then close your browser now. I won't be offended.

First, Cronin's massive tome reads like a movie. And it is in the movie category that we find that Cronin has essentially troped his way into an 800-page derivation of O.P.P. (other people's precedent). Essentially, Cronin has taken the Will Smith movie "I Am Legend" and sprinkled it over the top of "Resident Evil: Extinction" both of which just happened to come out in 2007, around the time Cronin was writing the first draft. For example, as though directly out of the Will Smith virus-drama, we have: 1) a naturally-occurring virus being hijacked and modified to help humans, which goes wildly awry. 2) infected turn into blood-thirsty, super-strong/agile/aggressive, light-phobic, hairless killers, 3) scattered "colonies" that supposedly survive the apocalypse, and 4) the infected show a surprising amount of organization and cunning. From Resident Evil: Extinction: 1) female protagonist is infected but not turned, develops some of the good but none of the bad qualities of the hyper-aggressive normal-infected, and subsequently turns into a killing machine on the good guy side, 2) America is a vast, uninhabited wasteland, and 3) a visit to the destroyed remains of Las Vegas.
The point is, I don't think anyone can justifiably argue that Cronin broke new ground with this novel.

Second, like when I read most science fiction novels, I am frustrated by the idea that throwing a bunch of science details into the novel means that the reader will consider the scenario plausible. For example Cronin starts the novel by discussing that the virus is found in a species of bats. Sounds plausible, right?
But there are simple breakdowns in the novel, like so many others, where we have to suspend belief. At the end, the female protagonist has successfully been infected with a modified version of the virus that gives her the incredible strength, speed, and agility the "smokes" (the character's nickname for the vampire-like infected) enjoy but without the negative features, like the unquenchable thirst for blood. At one point she jumps nearly 100 feet in a single bound.
And yet, the biomechanist in me scoffs. Such a jump would be impossible with ordinary human musculature. Surely she must have tripled or quadrupled her size in order to perform such a feet. And landing after that would crush a normal humans bones into splinters. Surely her bones are reinforced with some sort of heavier lattice?
Alas, the character appears outwardly unmodified by the virus, save for her sensitivity to light (and necessary wearing of goggles and headgear). And so I have to just sigh. Superhuman strength and agility make great plot devices for thrillers, but in the world of science fiction, an author should do the legwork and make the character...plausible. Throwing science into a novel might be enough to hoodwink the average reader...but come on, the average reader is reading Twilight, not real science fiction. Don't be lazy.

Nevertheless, those two things aside, the novel as a whole was a great read. Cronin spares no expense in character backgrounds, routinely spending pages on a character's backstory only to have them killed off. Inefficient to a fault, perhaps, but great prose in the meantime. And like I said before, the novel ended satisfyingly but openly enough that I am excited for the sequel, expected next year. When the world is controlled by 12 supervillains and you only manage to kill one of them in the first novel...you certainly leave yourself open for some more good narrative.

All in all, I recommend this book.

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40% Of My Day

2011-08-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

1. Think about cool idea that belongs in a science fiction novel.
2. Search wikipedia for evidence this idea doesn't exist IRL.
3. Search Google Scholar for researchers working on this idea.
4. Confirm the idea has not been commercialized, nor will be in the next 5 years.
5. Assume all that is needed is a spark of genius to make this idea a reality, despite the hundreds of researchers working on it.
6. Assume I am capable of producing this spark.
7. Amuse self with business plan for company that produces this idea.
8. Think about cool idea that belongs in a science fiction novel.
9. Search wikipedia for evidence this idea doesn't exist IRL.
10. Search Google Scholar for researchers working on this idea.
11. Confirm the idea has not been commercialized, nor will be in the next 5 years.
12. Assume all that is needed is a spark of genius to make this idea a reality, despite the hundreds of researchers working on it.
13. Assume I am capable of producing this spark.
14. Amuse self with business plan for company that produces this idea.
15. Think about cool idea that belongs in a science fiction novel.
16. Search wikipedia for evidence this idea doesn't exist IRL.
17. Search Google Scholar for researchers working on this idea.
18. Confirm the idea has not been commercialized, nor will be in the next 5 years.
19. Assume all that is needed is a spark of genius to make this idea a reality, despite the hundreds of researchers working on it.
20. Assume I am capable of producing this spark.
21. Amuse self with business plan for company that produces this idea.
22. Think about cool idea that belongs in a science fiction novel.
23. Search wikipedia for evidence this idea doesn't exist IRL.
24. Search Google Scholar for researchers working on this idea.
25. Confirm the idea has not been commercialized, nor will be in the next 5 years.
26. Assume all that is needed is a spark of genius to make this idea a reality, despite the hundreds of researchers working on it.
27. Assume I am capable of producing this spark.
28. Amuse self with business plan for company that produces this idea.

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The End of History?

2011-08-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

First: Amen.

Second, am I the only one who wants to plot a chart of income inequality in democratic countries over time and then compare it to a plot of the increase in # of democratic countries over time? I hate to disagree with Yglesias (who does this politics stuff better than I ever will) but there seems to be an underlying assumption here that once a certain level of democracy is achieved (fairness for everyone) that the country that has achieved it can not subsequently decline into a worse state of democracy, rather they just sit in stasis and purity until the slower countries catch up. That's almost certainly false.

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Please look as white as possible.

2011-08-24T12:05:00.000-05:00

Jerry Richardson is a racist bigot:

Richardson, who said that Newton “was dressed perfectly” for their meeting, was blunt. “I said, ‘Do you have any tattoos?’” Richardson told Rose. “He said, ‘No, sir. I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Do you have any piercings?’ He said, ‘No, sir. I don’t have any.’
I said, ‘We want to keep it that way.’ . . . ."

“We want to keep no tattoos, no piercings, and I think you’ve got a very nice haircut.”

Florio is quick to point out that a different employee of Richardson, Jeremy Shockey, has several tattoos that are very visible during games. Also visible during games is Shockey's skin which is white.

Of course what Richardson is implying here is that a "clean cut, American boy" look will somehow keep Cam Newton from adopting a lifestyle that Richardson finds distatesful. You know...a black one.

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My one thing

2011-08-24T11:48:00.002-05:00

If they old adage is true, and "everyone is good at something" then I think my one thing is making enchiladas.

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Verizon's ridiculous 4G rollout

2011-08-22T12:35:00.000-05:00

Gotta hit that crucial, lucrative Bettendorf, IA market before they move to less populous areas, like Kansas City...the 9th largest metro in the country.

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In Which I Admit I Am Merely A Product Of My Upbringing

2011-08-19T10:21:00.000-05:00

Jonah Lehrer points to a pretty dang convincing study that not only are there no long-term ill effects from smoking pot, but actually that once education/race/gender/social status are normalized, it turns out that pretty much everything D.A.R.E told us about pot is myth.

Once these population differences were corrected for, the long-term effects of marijuana use disappeared: The scientists found that “there were no significant between group differences.” In other words, the amount of pot consumed had no measurable impact on cognitive performance.Furthermore, there’s some intriguing evidence that marijuana can actually improve performance on some mental tests. A recent paper by scientists at University College, London looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming. This occurs when the activation of one word allows us to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word “dog” might lead to decreased reaction times for “cat,” “pet” and “Lassie,” but won’t alter how quickly we react to “chair.”

Well. I should just state for the record (and for the benefit of my mother) that I've never smoked pot. Never seen a need. Never understood the need in others. But as the quality, peer-reviewed evidence compounds...I have to admit: I have stopped seeing pot's illegality as worthwhile.

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Where is the artificial gravity research?

2011-08-18T20:28:00.002-05:00

Just asking.

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Sure it has a 0.25 MOA at 250 yards, but can it run Crysis?

2011-08-18T20:15:00.001-05:00

Here's a long, interesting article about Accuracy International, the sniper rifle outfit that is supplying many western nations with cutting-edge man-killers. I want to highlight one passage though:

Sniping, and the design, engineering and manufacture of sniper rifles, revolves around one characteristic: precision. There are no grey areas with sniping — a bullet fired at long range either hits its target, or it doesn’t, depending on how good the rifle and its human operator are.

My initial knee jerk reaction was to point out the author's misuse of precision. The way the paragraph is written one should actually use the term "accuracy" if referring to whether the fired bullet is a hit or a miss. By definition:
Accuracy: how close to the target the projectile is.
Precision: how close together multiple projectiles are.

That said, I think the author is overtly right. A "tight group" is lord of all in high-end rifles. Custom rifles are rated on their "MOA," that is Minute Of Angle of their group. The tighter - more preciese - the group, the better. If a rifle fires consistently it is good. The aim (accuracy) can be adjusted by the shooter. The precision (largely) cannot.

Anyway, the point I wanted to make was simply that accuracy and precision are two different things. Think of it next time you play darts. Hitting a bullseye is accurate. Hitting 20 three times in a row is precise.

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Bad Parenting

2011-08-13T21:17:00.000-05:00

Today I saw you at the park. You were proudly watching your son's football practice.

One thing I've learned to do since my daughter was born was to not judge other parents. That deranged father with a death-grip on his daughter's arm while she screams and claws at him? I don't judge him...he's probably me.

But all that aside, I have to judge you. Because you were clearly putting your son's in harm's way. A seven year-old should not be playing tackle football. Certainly, signing your son up for sports is a great way to keep him healthy. And a complicated team sport like football, with 22 players all with specific jobs that may vary on each play is a great way to teach your son critical thinking skills under pressure. He'll be more confident when he grows up, and probably look back when nostalgia when he thinks about his youth football league days.

That is...if he can think at all. Here's a link to a library of research that has proven that the worst possible thing that can happen to a youth is for them to get one or more concussions before the age of 12. Time after time, researchers have found that the damage to the brain at that early age carries forward into their teens and adulthood, and causes serious problems later on.
I understand that the occasional concussion is probably unavoidable for a little boy. I was one, and more than once I used my head as a brake to stop the rest of my body and was more than a little disorientated afterwards.
But having your little boy put on a heavy plastic helmet and run at other little boys is pointless and stupid risk.

It's not like there aren't alternatives. "7 on 7" leagues and flag football leagues are prevalent and available. Your son can learn every single thing about football rules, get good exercise, and most importantly of all can run around the field with almost zero risk of concussion. Especially since tackling is prohibited and player contact is heavily frowned upon.

It's possible you simply don't realize that tackle football is incredibly dangerous for little boys. You might not have spent the time reading Gregg Easterbrook's weekly articles. You might simply have done it as a kid yourself, and having come out of it largely unharmed, are unaware that many of your peers now suffer from serious head injury-related conditions.
But there's also a chance that you know about the risks, and don't do anything. Part of you is thinking that the "head start" you're giving him will pay off with his lucrative Michigan football scholarship and then multi-million dollar NFL contract. Part of you is thinking about how you were a mediocre-at-best football player - not because of lack of physical prowess, nay you were a gifted athlete to be sure - but because you just didn't have a good enough headstart. And if that is so, shame on you sir.

Look, whatever your reasons, I don't really care. Like I said, I try not to judge. Carrying my daughter out of Wal-mart like a banshee/burrito I might not have looked like Dad of the Year. But I want you to stop sending your boy to play tackle football. I judge you...

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Guessing Passwords

2011-08-10T10:29:00.000-05:00

Normally I find XKCD hilarious and insightful, but I have to wonder at this one:

If his first password, "Tr0ub4dor&3" is from the ASCII character set, then he's actually got an 11 character password, which translates to 72 bits. Where he gets "28 bits" I do not know. 2^72 at 1000/guesses per second is 150 billion years to crack. What am I missing?

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To Keith Barnes, May You Rest In A Soft Bed Made of RNA Polymerase

2011-08-06T23:00:00.000-05:00

On the first day of class, Mr. Barnes handed me (and everyone else in the class) an 11X17" sheet of paper outlining the entire metabolic pathway of glucose in vertebrates. My life has not been the same since. The secrets - the dark, clandestine, unknowable secrets - were actually light, wondrous, and knowable. Mr. Barnes showed us the way. He had irrevocably changed my life in one day. I only signed up for his class, "college biology," because a few years earlier my sister had taken it and had rave reviews.

Oh, Mr. Barnes, I wish you were still alive. I wish I could find you like I did, one more time, volunteering at the Nelson, like the last time I found you, and tell you that you were the most important teacher I ever had. I wish I could tell you that your personality was every bit as important as the content of your class. I wish I could tell you...so much. How I had gone on to college to major in bioengineering. How I would say to myself "when I grow up, I want to be Mr. Barnes." How science seemed such an impossibly difficult topic until you opened it up for me.

Is electrophoresis a normal thing to have had high school students do in the 90's? Because we did it. We extracted DNA. And we injected chicks with chorionic gonadotropin. Then we euthanized them and inspected their testicles. And we thought. Oh, how we thought. Which was this strange, wonderful thing to be doing. I spent my days, that one glorious 5 months of my whole life, thinking.

It is no suprise to me that ten years after that class, with my artist/wife in hand, I found you volunteering at The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. Of course the incredible Mr. Barnes would retire from a career teaching science to volunteer at an art museum.

Oh, Mr. Barnes, how I wept when I read your obituary. I openly wept and hid from my wife while I did it. Because how do you explain it to someone who didn't know you? How do you explain that a piece of the world has been ripped away...a piece that was good?
I weep now as I write this. Not as much because of your death, but because I am too late to say it to your face. If there is one regret in my life...maybe in the life of all people...it is that we are mortal and so is everyone else, and when we realize the things we should tell people it often is just too late.
Sayeth the wise:

Loretta Wood, a friend and colleague said about his ability to inspire and motivate, “Our older son, Garrett, was a “Barnes grad,” and often returned from KU for those famous Thanksgiving dinners at Olathe South, where the alumni line was 40 deep. Our younger son, Cullen, deployed with his Marine Intel unit, waited hours in line at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, to call “the old man” and wish him a happy birthday. Such is his legacy…”

Cullen was in my class. Mr. Barnes...why did you die? The mortality of life never felt so unfair to me. I miss you. I work hard because of people like you.

Every time I think about Mr. Barnes I start crying. I pray there is an afterlife...not for myself, but because I want to believe Mr. Barnes is enjoying it.

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In homage to my high school english teachers, Ms. Kohl and Mrs. Williams

2011-08-06T21:53:00.003-05:00

In the interests of disclosure I must admit this: I am 80% of the way through a bottle of 'Two Buck Chuck.' They just opened a Trader Joe's here in town, and I admit I am partaking in their unexpectedly tasty wine selection.

Carol Williams. Vicki Kohl. While these names may not be immortalized in the annals of greatness, the fact that more than a decade after I had them as teachers I remember their names should alone stand as a to testament them. The women were, among other greater things, my junior and senior year English teachers. Here's the rub: I don't remember a damn thing they taught me.
Well, that's not entirely true. I remember sitting in Mrs. Williams class my junior year, reading through "Our Town" by Thornton Wilder. At the time it was all pomp and rote. I was there because science class wasn't for another hour. Yet a year later I'd land the lead, "George Gibbs", when the school put on the play. And without portraying George in the school play, would I have as much self-confidence? "Listen Emily, I'm going to tell you why I'm not going to Agriculture School. I think when you've found a person you're fond of..."
As for Ms. Kohl (senior year, AP English), I still remember her fateful words. The scene was thus: having just had my front tooth replaced (again) I was feeling a little antsy. At some point my (borderline ADD) self stood up and gesticulated...God only knows what. Ms. Kohl, with the voice like a harpy snapped "SIT DOWN, YOU HYPERACTIVE WEIRDO! QUIT ACTING LIKE A MAD BANSHEE!"
Ms. Kohl, you prophetess. A decade later I am still the same weirdo, and my daughter shows more than a little likeness for the familial trait of being a "mad banshee." If you do not retire soon, you may have to face her.
It would be seven years later, after I escaped those two women, that I'd sit down and write a 140 page master's thesis. Another four years, and I would make a name for myself at work as "an engineer who can actually write." My boss, at my promotion, would tell me to "expect to spend at least 20% of your time writing proposals, because you are a damn good writer."

While I can credit (justifiably) my mother with my ability to read...I must give credit where credit's due for my ability to write. And that skill was turned from clumsy to "language art" by those two women. Even now, with my head swimming admirably (mom probably does not find my swimming head admirable), I can write with a gusto and skill that many people lack. Is it because I am unusually gifted? Or is it because I was blessed with two especially amazing teachers, who subtly and successfully prodded into my brain the intricacies of the English language, and then made me practice it, essay after essay? I humbly submit it is because of the latter.

Ms. Kohl. Mrs. Williams. I never thanked you for the obviously underrated education you gave me at the time, because I was a sniveling teenager who saw no value in it. Believe me, I see it now. So thank you. Thank you for giving me C's on things. Thank you for challenging me. Thank you for doing your job. Thank you for doing it well. And please forgive any grammar mistakes I have made in this post.

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Question of the Day

2011-08-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

If your God-given talent happened to be "the incredible ability to recreate scientific research that has been recently published in peer-reviewed journals and prove that it is junk," would you feel blessed by this or cursed?

Surely you perform a great benefit to society by casting a clear light on dubious research...but on the other hand the scientific community almost certainly will despise you.

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City Planets

2011-08-03T08:12:00.000-05:00

I really like this Robin Hanson post about human (or other) population at a galactic level. His point:

If Earth were paved over with a city the density of Manhattan today (1.6 million in 60 square kilometers), Earth would have a population of 14 thousand billion. Since Manhattan now has an average building height of 25 meters, a two kilometer deep version could hold a million billion people, and a two thousand kilometer deep version (Earth’s radius is 6400km) could hold a billion billion people.

And his thesis:

Most science fiction seems to vastly underestimate the population that a single planet or star can hold, and the strength of the economic pressures to keep an economy close together, rather than spread across vast distances.

Before we get into this, let's just dismiss the "two thousand kilometer deep version" because 2,000km deep into the Earth it is between 3,000 and 5,000 degrees F and humans living there is pretty implausible. If he means building up into the sky 2,000 km, well...putting up buildings high enough to reach the ISS is just as implausible.
But a 2 km deep society is somewhat plausible, assuming you had engineering techniques to move the Earth that deep (you could dump it into the oceans to backfill them and make more land for building) and pump fresh air that deep. Or that you had the resources to build Burj Khalifa/Taipei 101 all over the place. So let's assume that Hanson's estimate of a world population of a million billion people (1,000 trillion aka 1 quadrillion) is a fair maximum. In that society, the average person needs 2,000 calories a day to stay healthy.
Now as I was getting wound up to go into some math about the natural resources required to sustain exawatts of calorie consumption, I noticed Hanson add the following update to his blog (as though to cut my argument off at the knees before I even wrote it!):

Even an unmodified sun radiates enough energy to cover the calorie consumption of over a hundred “galaxies” of humans, and far more ems.

But what he doesn't get after is what's to be done with the "waste heat" produced by our bodies. An oversimplified average amount of heat produced by a human body is 100 watts. So multiply that by the million billion people and you have a CRAPLOAD of waste heat...simply from the humans. Add in our bevy of electronic devices and you've essentially turned the surface of the Earth into a kiln.

Of course, if you did have 2,000 km high buildings, which Hanson suggested but I rejected, they'd essentially be going into LEO (low earth orbit) and you could use them (when they were on the night side of Earth) as massive heat sinks.

Nevertheless, I think the fundamental problem with Hanson's thesis that "science fiction authors consistently underestimate the population potential of a planet" is that Hanson is not cynical enough. With a mere 7 billion people, our planet is a torrid, violent, disease-ridden, famine-plagued, caste-driven, unsustainable mess. Multiply the human population by 1,000 and you multiply the problems, as well.

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Global Warming Happening Much Slower Than Expected?

2011-07-29T13:16:00.000-05:00

Back in 2010, President Obama suggested NASA refocus its energies a little bit on using satellites to observe Earth's weather and gather more data on climate change.

Well apparently they did, and boy is it surprising:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Well, I for one am actually glad of this. It should relieve my ancestors to know that their reckless industrialism may not have destroyed the future as quickly as feared. The extreme weather of the last few years is simply that: an extreme. Not the new normal. Or at least, the if the new normal is hot, it isn't as likely caused by humans as it is the natural sway and variation of the Earth itself.

However, even if we can breathe a (cool) sigh of relief about global temperatures, it does not mean humans aren't absolutely destroying the Earth. Here, I point to harvested fish biomass reductions and a beautiful (though apocalyptic) graphic by David McCandless:

Global temperatures have little or nothing to do with the way we are fishing the oceans. Or the way we are causing (through agriculture and hunting/harvesting) the most massive extinction event in 75million years.

But at least when aliens visit our lifeless blue marble in a few thousand years, having traveled here with utmost speed, excited to meet us, after receiving our first radio transmissions into deep space in the 1940's...and they arrive here only to exhume the ruins of our long gone and mostly eroded civilizations...at least then the weather will be nice.

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White Roofs

2011-07-28T09:26:00.000-05:00

Sullivan starts a thread on white roofs. This Duke University prof confuses me by arguing that white roofs are so good at cooling that in the winter (anything can be argued true when you can point to a somewhat-related scientific study!) you'll have to provide extra heat to offset the lack of sun heating the normally black roof. This extra heating is greater than (the article and Dr. Chameides argue) the decrease in cooling needed during the summer, therefore white roofs are a plague on the world and cause increased carbon dioxide production.

I'm no NOAA scientist running calculations and I have to give them credit, but something here seems really fishy to me. And I think the problem is that they've de-regionalized a sustainability solution. On a global scale, they argue (and admit the limitation of the argument) that white roofs are a net negative. But they also concede that air conditioning isn't available in many places, nor are Energy Star appliances.

This leads me back to what I've been arguing for quite some time: in order for sustainability to work it needs to be regionalized. Although water conservation in general is a good idea (or rather wasting water is a bad idea), it doesn't make sense for an architect designing a building in Missouri to put in low-flow toilets when that architect could save money on normal toilets and use that money instead on better wall and attic insulation. In New Mexico, it makes more sense to focus on solar installation and water conservation. In Minnesota focus on better insulation for homes.
Look, sustainability is important, and as TPI once smartly pointed out: its easy and the technology is readily available to decrease our carbon consumption through efficiency gains rather than futuristic clean energy concepts like fusion. But sustainability cannot be applied with a broad brush. Especially when climates vary, societal pressures vary, etc.

So while white roofs put on every roof on the planet might not be a net gain...its still a really good idea for a lot of areas.

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Competing Headlines Battle It Out!

2011-07-26T10:35:00.000-05:00

MSNBC: Fewer people buy homes, but prices rise.
CNN: Home Prices dip 4.5%

Amazingly, both these articles have the same content.

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The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization

2011-07-26T07:42:00.000-05:00

$263,000,000 for a movie about teen vampires. Meanwhile...

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Curbing College Costs by Ending University Athletics, Ctd

2011-07-22T15:09:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan points to this Wilbon piece suggesting that colleges should pay collegiate athletes:

If the student as athlete can find a way, he/she should be able to endorse products, to have paid-speaking gigs, to sell memorabilia, as Allen Sack, the author and professor at the college of business at the University of New Haven has suggested in recent years. The best college athletes in the two revenue-producing sports have always been worth much more than tuition, room, board and books. The best football and basketball players in the Big Ten have produced to the degree that a television network has become the model for every conference in America, a network worth at least tens of millions of dollars to the member institutions. Yet, no player can benefit from that work. The players have become employees of the universities and conferences as much as students -- employees with no compensation, which not only violates common decency but perhaps even the law.

Sullivan adds a follow up from a reader:

Some will say that the free college education is reward enough. Others will say that college sports is supposed to be amateur athletics, and still others will point out that all the money the schools receive from the "big sports" go to fund the less popular sports.
But the people saying these things are ignoring the reality of the situation. The kind of athlete who would like to get paid illegally today does not value their education the way you or I would. These people are invested in their hands, their legs, their bodies; the skills they have to offer the world are physical, not mental (in most cases). An elite athlete's life after sports will be relatively the same whether they have a college degree or not. Besides, most of these students who do play professional sports never finish their degree.

What's the point of a college? I ask this question seriously. The answer I would give is this: the point of a college is to provide people (of any age) a place to obtain an education and/or skills that will enable them to have a job that an non-college-educated person could not do. That and that alone is the point of a college.

Now, I recognize that in order for a college to recruit and retain top-level educators as well as in order to lure high-potential graduate students, they must also allow the professors to do their own research, and subsidize the education of the graduate students in exchange for their work under the tutelage of these professors. Therefore, colleges have grant-writing facilities and laboratories and all the things professors need so they can have the fun while they aren't preoccupied with the doldrums involved in educating tomorrow's leaders.

Further, while I've argued before, half-jokingly, that University-Sponsored Athletics Should Be Abolished, I am not so naive as to believe there is no place for it. I recognize that Saturday afternoon football games are a great way to lure back Alumni aka donors and certainly many of those donors provide important revenue to the school, either by way of donation or less directly by sending their children to the school who then are charged tuition.

However, one thing a college is NOT is a venue for some enterprising young athlete to advertise his money-making skills to the commercial marketplace in order to secure a lucrative sports drink contract. Nor is a college athletic program simply an entertainment provider for the TV watchers of America. If 18-year-olds believe they have the skills necessary to excel at professional athletics, playing on a college team with no intention to graduate does neither them nor the college a service. In fact, having a "one-and-done" star on the school roster is a massive drain on resources:
- The recruiting staff has spent a small fortune trying to win the allegiance of this player.
- The education the athlete will laugh off will be subsidized through scholarships...which is paid for either by taxpayer subsidies or by offsetting it with higher tuition across the rest of the student body.
- Tutors are often hired by the University under the auspices of helping these students to pass.

Finally, there's the casuality implied in a statement like "besides, most of these [student athletes] who do play professional sports never finish their degree." Thank you for succinctly summarizing the entire problem.

Here's something to chew on: of the 450 or so underclassmen that will quit college early to enter the NFL draft next year, only 70% of them will get drafted. Of the ones that do get drafted, less than 20% will still be in the NFL in 4 years. That means roughly 86% of these guys will be on the street. And of those unlucky guys, their college-football-playing counterparts who finished college but never even went to the NFL will end up making $600,000 more during their careers than the fellas who skipped their senior year in search of a fast buck.

But by all means, let's even further monetize college athletics by allowing "student athletes" to take endorsement deals.

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The Three Rules of Modern American Economics

2011-07-22T07:45:00.000-05:00

Another apt title for this post would be "why I'm a liberal."

The above chart has, for several months now, floated around the internet and irritated me like no other graphic I can remember. Partially it is because it is so obviously true, and partially because I know the truth of it is as inescapable as gravity.

The Three Rules of Modern American Economics
Rule 1: Rich get richer. Everyone else gets stagnant.
Rule 2: Repeat Rule 1.
Rule 3: Pretend Rule 1 isn't true.

I think this is pretty cynical of me, but I also think it's absolutely true.

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Unobtainium

2011-07-22T07:39:00.000-05:00

I love these "mine the moon" concepts because they are so far-fetched. Here's a run down of the plan:
1) Set up $20 billion Moon base
2) Strip mine huge areas of the Lunar surface for Helium-3
3) Ship Helium-3 back to Earth for use as a fuel source for yet-to-be-invented fusion reactors
4) Repeat 2-3 while also paying for maintenance of Moon base.
Meanwhile:
5) Invent a fusion reactor with positive output
6) Build fusion reactor (several billion dollars)

I';m suddenly reminded of the movie Avatar (2009), in which the humans arrive on "Pandora" and set up an expensive mining operation to extract hilariously-named "unobtainium" which has a value of "20 million a kilo."

Back in reality, Harrison Schmitt, the advocate for this Helium-3 Lunar strip mining operation suggests the Helium-3 is worth at least "1.5 million a kilo"

The question I have to ask is this: how is this possibly a better solution than solar panels? Isn't it pretty common knowledge that all the world's electricity needs could be met with widespread adoption of solar?
Or, if this were to be an American-only operation and not some sort of international Helium-3 mining cooperative, the numbers become even more ludicrous. All America could easily be powered by solar energy into the next century for less money, with less risk to human life, and perhaps most importantly of all: solar panels can be purchased from companies that don't have a 60 year relationship with the DoD. Solar can be sourced from new startups. Solar companies could set up manufacturing facilities for all that power here in the U.S., and make a positive economic/jobs push.

I am no critic of fusion power. I have lauded it more than once on this blog. But sourcing fusion fuel from the Moon? Really? Maybe while we are up there we can extract all that water they say is trapped in the regolith. And we can find that Transformers crash site, too.

Now, I should point out that I've approached the ideas of Harrison Schmitt with more than a little cynicism before. Back in May, Schmitt outlined a post-NASA organization for space exploration he called the NSEA that basically was just NASA, rebooted. Last time he wanted a Moon base to keep it out of the hands of the Chinese. This time he wants a Moon base for Helium-3 mining. What will he try next?

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The Exobrain

2011-07-19T08:54:00.000-05:00

Typically I razz on Jonah Lehrer, but this article about the internet's effect on human memory is spot on, and makes an incredibly valid point:

And this is where the internet comes in. One of the virtues of transactive memory is that it acts like a fact-check, helping ensure we don’t all descend into selfish solipsism. By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our own reconsolidations. In this sense, instinctually wanting to Google information – to not entrust trivia to the fallible brain – is a perfectly healthy impulse. (I’ve used Google to correct my errant memories thousands of times.) I don’t think it’s a sign that technology is rotting our cortex – I think it shows that we’re wise enough to outsource a skill we’re not very good at. Because while the web enables all sorts of other biases – it lets us filter news, for instance, to confirm what we already believe – the use of the web as a vessel of transactive memory is mostly virtuous. We save hard drive space for what matters, while at the same time improving the accuracy of recall.

Friday Poetry Burst

2011-07-15T15:34:00.000-05:00

Well, not literal poetry today, but when Chaplin performed it, it was basically poetry nonetheless.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor - that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible -- Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another; human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me I say, "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate; only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers: Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, "the kingdom of God is within man" -- not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite!! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise!! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Weekly Devotional

2011-07-13T07:25:00.000-05:00

Once again, I came up in the rotation at church:

So I tried to explain to my 3-year-old Ava what "the purpose" of something is. For example the purpose of a refrigerator is to keep things cold. The purpose of a car is to carry people around from place to place. The purpose of a fork is to pick up food. However things became very hazy (i.e. Daddy became stumped) when I tried to explain what the purpose of a person was. There are some easy ones. For example, apparently the purpose of a grandparent is to spoil a granddaughter and give her popsicles even when her father thinks she doesn't especially deserve one.

But if Ava had asked me "what is your purpose, Daddy?" I would have had a real problem. Because honestly I don't know what my purpose is. Is my purpose to raise my kid? To work my job? To love my wife? All the above? Or am I meant for some "higher" purpose, like inventing a new form of power, or building water purification devices for people in the Third World, or curing cancer? It's a scary notion to accept that I really don't know the answer to that. I wake up most days, go to work, come home, hang out with my family, and go to bed having not once wondered how the activities of that day fit into a larger scheme for my life. I'd end the day never having asked myself whether I had really made any progress on my life's purpose. Of course this realization is unacceptable. I should have a purpose!

So I picked up my Bible to see if God could help me find a purpose for my life. Of course, the answer had been right in front of me the entire time.

A teacher of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him: "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" Answered Jesus: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. And Love your neighbor as yourself."

It turns out that my purpose is the same as yours, the same as everyone's: to love. Maybe at the end of the day I shouldn't be asking myself if that day was part of some grand cancer-curing process, or if that day had been spent working toward building an engineering empire. Instead, at the end of the day I should simply stop and ask myself "Did I love today?" And this is true for all of us. Our lives, careers, families, and personal goals are all highly varied, but this one purpose is universal among us all.

Helen Keller once wrote that happiness comes from "fidelity to a worthy purpose." What worthier purpose is there from which to derive happiness than a consistent and overt attempt to love each and every person we meet? It certainly isn't easy. But a worthy life's purpose shouldn't be easily accomplished. A life's purpose should be something challenging, radical, and noble. But most importantly, having "to love" as a purpose allows us to measure our progress each and every day. Maybe some days we won't make progress, we'll regress. For example when I was cut off on the highway this morning and then almost rear-ended someone...I definitely did not love. But I've got the rest of the day to work on it. And the rest of my life too.

By the way, I did a better job at loving on the drive to work this morning. So, there's progress.

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No, the Government isn't ALWAYS the Problem.

2011-06-29T10:43:00.000-05:00

It is the oldest complaint in the book. "If it weren't for the government, we would have (comparative adjective) (commodity)." For example, "if it weren't for government, we'd have cheaper gas," or "if it weren't for the government, we'd have cooler radio programming," or "if it weren't for the government, we'd have better schools."

In the five years, the really vogue statement has become "If it weren't for the government, we would have (cheaper/faster/more accessible/better/European-like/fairer/safer/free/unlimited) internet." Of course, all of these statements are almost universally false. Does anyone ever say "If it weren't for government, we'd have 100 Terabyte hard drives"? Not that I know of. Does anyone say "If it weren't for government, we'd have 10 gigahertz GPUs in every smartphone"? No. These things are not said because it is obvious that the development of those technologies is based on what the "market need" is, and not on what the "theoretical limit" is. For example, the average consumer desire for hard drive capacity has increased roughly 2-5% year/year since personal computers became available. Simply put: 100 Terabyte hard drives do not exist because virtually no one needs them. 10 gigahertz processors do not exist because virtually no one has software that could run on them...i.e. no one needs them.

The question of faster, cheaper broadband is actually surprisingly similar. The author of the above linked article, Rick Karr, points out that in the Netherlands "visited homes there that get 100 mbps service in both directions - they can upload as fast as they download." The question I have is this: what the crap do you need 100 mbps upload speed for? For those of you who don't know the internet term "mbps" it stands for "megabits per second." U.S. standard broadband plans typically vary from 0.5 to 18 mbps for homes. Those are just the download speeds, however. Upload speeds are generally about a quarter to a tenth the download speed.
It's a serious question, I am asking. What in God's name does a home consumer do on the internet that requires them to upload files at 100 mbps? Currently there is only one thing: illegally seeding movies and music for others. Even the most demanding games on Xbox or PS3 require only a tiny fraction of that bandwidth. Streaming HD movies off of Netflix? That's downloading, not uploading. Illegally sending your friends copies of an illegally obtained digital version of Captain America? Now that's uploading.

But let's get back to the topic of the American internet situation. And for the sake of argument, let's pretend like the ~~whiners~~ gamers who write articles about needing faster internet are actually correct and the current speed of broadband in America isn't sufficient.
Who's fault is it? Karr clearly thinks the blame falls on the government, because that's the title of his piece. But he never explains it. He just attacks AT&T and Verizon for being "afraid of competition." As though that's a corporate vice. What exactly does Karr think the government has done? Not forced American internet service providers to compete more and screw themselves? In almost the same breathless paragraph, Karr touts the free market competition in the UK and then praises the government for its direct intervention in that market.

Here in Kansas City, Google is planning to install a fiber optic network throughout the city. Pricing for this "1 gigabit" network is expected to be similar to local broadband costs. But now the question the city executives and local business owners are asking is "what the crap do we do with 1 gigabit internet?" According to some data, thats a pretty good question for Karr's fabled "100 mbps" Netherlands. The fastest, most connected city in the world, Seoul, only manages to burn through about 15 mbps per person (and that's download, not upload). Why does a Dutchman need 8 times that? Why does anyone?

The market for broadband will continue to strengthen. Don't get me wrong. A day will come where every teenage kid needs 100 mbps in his/her house to keep up with their peers. But today isn't that day. Neither is tomorrow. There is no home consumer market for it. And because there is no market for it, there is no U.S. company that provides it. This is not the fault of the government, it is simply the reality of American society in 2011. There is no law that says you cannot have 100 mbps internet at your house. There is no law that says AT&T can't set up a faster internet system. There's just no market for it.

A final thought on Karr's article: I hate to call him out as a blatant liar, but he claims that U.S.-equivalent broadband is available via TalkTalk for $6/month. That's true - for the first 6 months - then the price doubles to $12. Add in the mandatory monthly "line rental" at another $18/month (wow, I thought US fees were bad, try 300% in fees), add in taxes and you've got $35/month for internet. Certainly this is cheap. But its really not that much more than the basic DSL package from AT&T...which is only $15/month. In fact AT&T advertises blazing fast broadband for a mere $19.95 a month. I must be confused. It's almost like broadband via AT&T (Karr's fraidy cats) is actually just as cheap if not cheaper than the super-awesome "competitive market" broadband in Britain.

Karr's article, like so many others, is a classic in "the way they do (pseudo-public service) in (European country) is...somehow...better" that can be fairly easily demolished (and regularly is). American government is not the problem. American lack of demand for ultra-fast broadband is the problem.

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Michele Bachmann

2011-06-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

Since when is "refusal to ever compromise" actually a good quality for a politician to have? Or a human being in general? Never needing to compromise implies that you are 100% right, on every issue, every time. Which is the opinion typically reserved for mentally unstable individuals.

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Home News

2011-06-27T07:54:00.000-05:00

Last week I was named to Ingram's Magazine "20 in their twenties" list, which recognizes "a score of up-and-coming twenty-somethings who are flexing their entrepreneurial muscle and making their mark on the Kansas City business scene." In case that link dies, here's what they wrote about me:

When it comes to innovation, Alex Waller oozes entrepreneurial zeal: “If you want to step into the game, you have to be tireless, ambitious, and not afraid to stick your neck out and champion an innovative idea,” says the 29-year-old mechanical engineer at MRI Global, formerly the Midwest Research Institute. In his line of work there is vision, and there is road-kill: “I think the speed at which innovation is moving is what keeps most people out of it,” he says. Working for a high-profile research organization, Waller is exposed to a wide array of projects. Basically, if it moves, flows, blinks or breathes, Waller has in interest in measuring just how much. His expertise is in design, rapid prototyping and testing of devices for clients with national-defense interests. His achievements include development of an air-monitoring device used at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and he’s currently working as project manager or designer on such varied projects as a biological particle collector for Homeland Security, a portable water-purification system for use in developing nations, and tracking eye gaze using motion-capture cameras. And he brings a mature altruism to his work, as with the water system: “Profit,” he says, “doesn’t have to be the only measure of success for an innovative idea.”

The selection process was a two-fold one. One of my bosses wrote a nomination letter on my behalf (and without my knowledge). After making the first round of cuts, I received an application in which I answered questions in short essay form about "my vision" for entrepreneurship. I made that cut too, and got a few pretty pictures of myself taken for the magazine. And of course, now I'm sort of the wunderkind of my company. Which is fun, I'll admit. I've been trying to be humble about all this. I really have. But humility was never my strongest attribute.

This all may have been fortuitious; my annual review is this afternoon.

And no, the picture above was not intended to be serious.
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Cars That Drive Themselves, Ctd - Road Trains

2011-06-25T20:43:00.000-05:00

Let me describe a form of transportation for you. Upon leaving the house and heading for work, a commuter find the nearest "terminal" and climb aboard the mass transit utility. This utility moves along a predetermined path (as do many other replicates of it) and at various points commuters get on and off as suits their personal commute. The mass transit utility is a large machine that is driven by a trained professional. If you get to a terminal and have missed the most recent mass transit utility, you simply wait for the next one and embark upon it.

What does this sound like to you? A bus system? A subway system? A train system? How about a car system? I admit from the get go that I have very mixed emotions about the road train system being proposed here:

When road train technology is commercialized, a driver equipped with platooning software could use an in-vehicle navigation screen to find the nearest platoon and drive to the end of it. At that point, the car could wirelessly connect to the platoon and take over braking, acceleration, and steering —and drivers could safety start texting or watching a movie.
Volvo imagines that professional drivers would lead each platoon, though there is no technical reason why regular drivers couldn't take over. But just as bus drivers are required to have special licenses, Coelingh believes that road train lead drivers should probably have special qualifications for the job. Employing professional drivers would also remove a lot of legal hurdles, since each road train would be led by a real, live human.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am all-in when it comes to getting driving out of the hands of human drivers. But the reason I am so mixed on Road Trains is this: it will almost certainly increase congestion.
The designers make it sound so simple...just get on the highway and find the nearest road train to join. But what if it is in front of you? Do you speed up to catch it? That implies that either you break the speed limit (dangerous) or the road train is moving along below the speed limit (inefficient). Or do you slow down and let the road train behind you catch up and pass, then join it? That makes you a danger to people behind you, who have to get around.
The designers also seem to suggest that a huge, bulky vehicle lumbering down the highway, driven by a professional driver, would ease traffic. But it is my experience, here in reality, that tractor trailers (semis, big rigs, call them what you will) that are driven by professional drivers (isn't that what a CDL license is) do not mitigate traffic in any way, rather their slow acceleration only exacerbates areas of stop and go traffic.

I guess I just don't see the utility of this system. It seems like it would add another layer of complexity to traffic, and would although the time you spent lazily in autopilot in the road train would certainly relieve you of driving responsibilities (and by extension increase overall road safety) the perils of finding and joining a road train, much less the dangerous flux of cars in and out of a road train as they join or leave, would cause a net increase in danger on the roadways.

There is a utility for road trains, however. That utility would be on long drives to from city to city. Imagine leaving Kansas City, and instead of having to pay attention on the notoriously perilous Interstate 70 to St. Louis, you could join a scheduled road train for a small fee and just play scrabble until you got to StL. Over a long trip like that, the 15-20% increase in gas mileage accrued by being in the road train would be substantial and would justify the fee. The safety increase and the 4+ hours of free time you'd gain would also justify it. It'd be like...a greyhound bus system except at the end you have your car to tool around in.

But road trains for commutes...I'm not sold.

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Spam Filtering Reality

2011-06-24T15:04:00.000-05:00

Here's a question for you: if "spam filters" are readily available (and increasingly effective) for email service, why is there no spam filter for snail mail? I think some people would probably be willing to pay a monthly fee for junk mail filtering. It could be a good revenue source for the cash-strapped USPS. People pay $5/month and the USPS automatically filters out any credit card applications or mass sent mail.

It would be easy to set up, too. When the USPS mail sorting system is scanning letters, if it sees several hundred parcels of mail with the exact same size, shape, and return address, it flags it as spam. Then, it cross-references that against a list of people on the "no junk" list. Whenever it gets a positive match, that spam goes right into the recycle bin. It'd be easy. Why don't they do it?

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How It All Ends, Ctd

2011-06-14T08:07:00.000-05:00

Almost 2 years ago (!) I wrote a short entry titled "How It All Ends" in which I argued:

When we destroy this planet, I mean really tip it over the edge, it'll be because we wrecked the oceans. Life started with water, and life will end with it.

The problem is that people can see land-based pollution and ecological destruction quite well. Air-based destruction of the environment is a bit harder to see, and unsurprisingly air-based pollution regulation is near-impossible to get through Congress. But still, we are able to mildly regulate air pollution. But what about water based pollution regulation? Its nearly non-existent. Not to mention even the idea of water pollution regulation is new. Water-resource management, on the other hand, is a laugher. Take these recent images produced by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful

So what's to do? Fish are a much healthier alternative than livestock, and unlike most livestock, can feasibly be cultivated and then harvested from "the wild."
Or that's what we used to think. Everyone used to believe that the ocean was this vast, unquenchable source of life. And yet, the compelling evidence that we are destroying our environment regardless of whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring is growing larger and larger every day. Environmentalists need to come at this a different way. Instead of arguing whether global warming is real, they need to start asking "why aren't conservatives also conservationists?"
The answer is that human progress is incompatible with sustainability. In the case of ocean fish populations, we need to either accept that soon enough fish will not exist, or start genetically engineering fish to reproduce and grow faster. We could all go vegetarian (and solve many of the nutritional/environmental problems of our age) but the idea of giving up meat completely is a tough pill to swallow for most of humanity, yours truly included.

My friend said to me yesterday "people need to learn to embrace change better." That may be true. It's also a fanciful notion.

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Friday Poetry Burst

2011-06-10T12:21:00.000-05:00

Not all poetry is words.

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A Real Choice

2011-06-10T09:45:00.002-05:00

Typically I have two themes on this blog when I write about environmental policy. The first theme is that humanity's continued growth is incompatible with a sustainable environment. Given that the majority of humans on Earth are still increasing their level of consumption, and are below the levels of consumption of America and western Europe, then the pace at which we are damaging the environment (if human progress continues) will only increase. The second theme I have is that given the above, I have to believe humanity has passed a "point of no return" in terms of the environment, and we need to acknowledge this, and really start doing what is best for the long term survival of our species, regardless of the outcome for other species.
Here's a perfect example: Bolivia. Turns out the nation in central South America, nestled against the Andes mountains, has one of the largest reserves of lithium on the planet:

Salar de Uyuni contains 9 million tonnes of lithium, more than a quarter of the world's known resources. This could rise to about 50 per cent if the lithium in more than 30 other salars and lagoons in south-western Bolivia is included. Lithium is increasingly required for the batteries that power phones, laptops, cordless tools and a range of hybrid and electric vehicles - so much so that there are fears that demand will soon outstrip supply. Talk that impoverished Bolivia could become "the Saudi Arabia of lithium" has encouraged its socialist president, Evo Morales, to keep this valuable resource under tight state control. The country has spent three years and more than $10 million on a pilot plant to extract the lithium.

But of course there is some rare/endangered/cute species that faces impending doom: the Chilean Flamingo. Concern about the nesting grounds being right in the middle of the lithium deposits has stirred controversy.
So there you have it, a real choice. 60% of Bolivians live below the poverty level. The price of lithium has gone up consistently, and tapping their vast resources in this extremely valuable mineral could pump valuable income into the country, especially if they can retain a controlling interest. Analysts suggest that the vast amount of lithium could make Bolivia "the Saudi Arabia of the Green World."
Or, we could protect the Flamingos.

And no one here is pretending like lithium mining is an environmentally clean operation. Mining that lithium would certainly displace or eliminate the rare Flamingos. It might cause water purity issues across the nation. And much of the lithium is underneath the fabled Salar de Uyuni, the massive salt flats that provides Bolivia with an important tourist-based income.

So here's your real choice:
1. Exploit the Earth in the name of human progress, be it betterment of poor Bolivians, access to lithium for electric car batteries and cleaner energy, and/or the continued development of human society as it has for 100 years based on the idea that natural resources for technology were unlimited.
2. Protect Flamingos and some pretty salt marshes. Humans continue to starve/live in poverty, lithium prices rise and the global economy is hindered by the lack of availability of the mineral resource.

Which would you choose?

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Dear Ava,

2011-06-09T15:18:00.000-05:00

Dear Ava,

As I was sitting here at work, on my lunch break, I felt a knot build in my throat. Your mother and I had just been on the phone, discussing her cousin's wedding we will be taking you to in Joplin, MO on Saturday. Your mother, bless her kind soul, has volunteered to help her Aunt decorate and undecorate the church and reception area, which means that from about Saturday morning at 7:30 to until midnight, you and I will be together. As your mother described this to me, and I said "it will be fine, we'll go see the tornado damage or something" I must admit that in my head I was thinking what an intolerable nuisance you are. I began to think about last night, when I didn't have time for a bike ride because from supper until dark my life was dominated by putting away your laundry, helping you clean your room, helping you with your bath, getting you ready for bed, and reading you stories. I am now nearly 20 pounds overweight, and somehow that is your fault: before your birth I was 5 lbs. underweight. I began to think about how fun attending a wedding would be with just your mother, like your uncle's wedding we went to a few weeks ago where you grandparents took you home early so that your parents could be "free." I began thinking about what an incredible financial stress you are to me, because of your summer camps, your school, travel, food, toys, clothes... I made a mental tally, right here at work while chomping down a chicken breast, of the thousands of dollars I'd have in my checking account if it weren't for you.

And then, I stopped. Why was I doing this? How was it possible that I could consider my own child a nuisance? The answer filled me with such sorrow that I realized I must confess it. I take your love for granted. Since the first day of your short little life, you have been done nothing but love. You wake up in the morning and love breakfast: "this is the cereal of my life ever!" You play in the sprinkler like getting wet is all that matters. You love everyone you meet, even strangers (we'll need to talk about this eventually). You love food: "I love beef. I love potatoes. I love biscuits! I love milk!" (Dinner last night was beef & potatoes with biscuits and a glass of milk).
But perhaps worst of all is the fact that you unabashedly love your mother and father. No matter what happens, you love us. Unconditionally. Unfailingly.
Which means I can be a shitty father tonight and tomorrow you'll still love me. That kind of leeway is more than I deserve. That kind of leeway let's me cheat you.
Sometimes, in the evening, when we finish stories and I tuck you in to bed, I sing "The Johnny Appleseed Song" for you.
Oh the Lord's been good to me,
And so I thank the Lord-
For giving me the things I need:
The Sun, and the Rain, and the Appleseed.
The Lord's been good to me.

Child, you are my Appleseed. When I think of all the accomplishments of my life, the college degree, the graduate degree, the job, being published, being honored, being promoted, submitting my first patent, submitting my first major proposal...they all seem such tiny, inconsequential things in comparison with the simple existence of you, my daughter.

Last night, I snapped at you when you didn't want to finish your dinner. Then, when you were getting ready for your bath, I angrily sent you to time-out because you wanted more toys in the bath with you. How awful of you! Then, after I forced you to ask me nicely for the toys, I tossed them at you like a bully. Minutes later, I was grabbing your arm to hold you still so I could wash you. Then I laid out rules for spots in the tub where you were not allowed to use your bathtub soap-crayons. When you deviated even a little from that restricted zone, I confiscated them. When you wouldn't get out of the bathtub quickly enough (you were trying to perform some sort of song for me) I interrupted you and snapped at you to move faster. When you chose a long book as your first book of the night, I limited you to just that one book instead of your usual three or four...but it was mostly because I wanted to go be by myself and play on Facebook not because the book was overly long. Because apparently "me-time" is more important than teaching you to read. After you were in bed, I sat and talked to your mom about a "much needed" vacation we should take somewhere far away from you. Then I resented you for the guilt I felt about wanting an "adults-only" vacation.
This morning, I got ready as quietly as I could, because Heaven forbid I wake you up and have to see your smiling, loving face say goodbye to me as I leave for a long day at work.

And now, as I sit here at my cube, a strangling fear has filled me. How many more times will you tolerate this? How many times can I act like my little girl should be held to the same standards as a grown woman before you finally reject me?
I know this is a feeble attempt at contrition. If I said these things aloud to you, you would not possibly let me get through them all before your mind would wander and you'd move on. And even if you did let my speech go to its entirety, you wouldn't possibly understand. And that is because you are a little girl. A beautiful, sweet little girl with a gigantic heart the size of the Moon. The times you run up to me and bury me with a hug are proof enough of this. All too often, I visualize you as a grown woman, and expect things from you that you should not be expected to be able to do.

Tomorrow I'll be a better daddy. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will tell myself "she's only a little girl!" And I will love you, regardless.

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He Who Is Without Sin

2011-06-07T14:03:00.000-05:00

I call b.s. on Ross's opin that Anthony Weiner needs to resign.

A confession is just words, so much sound and fury, without an act of contrition, and the act of contrition appropriate to Weiner’s offenses is the resignation of his office.

I'm trying really hard to imagine what offenses Ross is talking about. Certainly, if Representative Weiner has broken the law then he should resign. But if extra-marital shenanigans is the extent of Weiner's tomfoolery...well, if every politician who was guilty of the same or worse resigned...government would effectively shut down. Were his offenses his repeated lies to the press? If every politician who has lied to the press subsequently resigned...see above.
I'm not defending Rep. Weiner. Sending random twitter followers pictures of your weirdly hairless chest and pictures of your junk is really dumb. And the idiot is probably dealing with the consequences at home. He's probably facing a divorce, not to mention being immortalized for this on the internet. His career may have suddenly found a glass ceiling.
But it seems presumptuous and reactive to suggest the appropriate act of contrition is resignation. He's done nothing that politicians don't do every day already and America stands by.

Wheras Ross' proclamation for Vitter's resignation was predicated on the idea that Vitter had almost certainly committed an illegal act, in this case Ross has no illegal act to use as leverage. Just his gut feeling that a sleazy guy from New York should resign for turning out to be a sleazy guy from New York.

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Achievement

2011-06-07T12:01:00.001-05:00

Normally I'd be at the front of the line to make fun of motivational posters, but I saw one on Sunday and it spoke to me, because of some things going on that I can't really divulge yet. Forgive my self indulgence.

"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."

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Adventures in Youthful Arrogance, Ctd

2011-06-06T10:49:00.000-05:00

I think the reason this editorial by Dale Stephens rubbed me the wrong way is because it validates the accusations of Gen X and the Boomers' that my generation has a massive sense of entitlement.

The current recession has provided a unique opportunity to see just how painful life can be without a college. Unemployment is directly correlated to education level, as seen in the chart below from Calculated Risk. In fact, not getting educated is almost the worst thing you can do, other than be born poor and black.

Hideous is the fact that Mr. Stephens is throwing away a Stanford education to pursue his dream of "UnCollege," a place where self-motivated people can organize and teach themselves...everything that was already available at a college. He burns his bridges as he goes too, like a true thoughtless teenager:

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

Obviously no person expects to go crawling back on their hands and knees someday...but then again no one plans to fail. Yet, most of us do. So when, and if, Mr. Stephens fails at his startup, UnCollege, and his agent is no longer able to book speaking engagements for him (surprise!) and his book doesn't find a publisher (surprise!), he'll essentially be a penniless 19-year-old...just like the rest of the 19-year-olds in America. Except unlike them he's branded himself the spokesperson for anti-college.

But let's ignore his lack of foresight. Let's ignore the fact that he is probably giving really bad advice to young people. Let's ignore the fact that the number of CEO's in this country with an MBA is probably above 95% and assume Stephens is right: you can achieve your dreams of wealth with no formalized diploma on your wall. How are you going to do it? What product are you going to sell with no education? What investor will take an uneducated kid who thought he/she is too good for college and invest in them? Mr. Stephens just sounds like another rich kid impatient to be even richer.
What's really sickening here is that the content of the education he is hoping his rebellious peers will receive was developed on the backs of people with PhDs over centuries through long educations, the writing of theses, and the development of arduous research projects. The social networking aspect of Uncollege relies on access to the internet, a device built by a scientists including Lawrence Roberts, who had three degrees from MIT.

See, this is what I mean by entitlement. Stephens and his cohorts seem to have no gratitude for the diligent efforts of people who did go to college. He suggests college probably hampered these brains, and that the huge technical developments of past college-educated minds was actually less than ideal.
If only Wernher von Braun hadn't wasted his time at the Technical University of Berlin, maybe the Apollo program would have been a success. If only Newton had skipped Trinity College, he might have deduced the formulas of modern Calculus much sooner. Imagine if Watson and Crick hadn't gotten their PhDs. They might have discovered the structure of DNA sooner. If Alexander Fleming hadn't spent so much time in medical school, he might have discovered penicillin's antibacterial properties much sooner.
Obviously I say these things in jest. But that is because the idea that a college education hampers the human mind, rather than enables it, is such a ridiculous notion that we must categorically dismiss it.

Certainly, Stephens is right about two things: college is expensive and college is less than ideal. But the idea that self-guided learning is better is ludicrous.

Stephens has little nuggets, on his Uncollege website, which admits that you can't get a degree in nuclear engineering via Uncollege. "On the other hand, entrepreneurship is something that it’s definitely possible to accomplish outside of the classroom. Heck, some would say that paying thousands of dollars to study entrepreneurship is a very bad understanding of the field…"
Maybe that is true. Starting a company is pretty easy. Especially compared to actually doing science or engineering. Starting a company is definitely easier than showing patience and fortitude...two requirements to excel in college.

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Adventures in Youthful Arrogance

2011-06-03T10:20:00.001-05:00

What 19-year-old doesn't think college is a waste of time? You know what really is a waste of time? Asking for serious domestic policy editorials from a teenager.

When I was 19, I had it all figured out too. Then I grew up.

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Why There is Almost Certainly No Life Currently on Mars

2011-06-02T15:49:00.020-05:00

I think what a lot of people miss when they try to extrapolate extremophiles into the argument that life could exist on Mars or other seemingly hostile non-Earth planets is that the extremophiles did not originate in their current extreme environment.
Most paleobiologists agree that the reason life arose on Earth was that the "primordial soup" was perfectly suited for life. It was warm, wet, and complex organic molecules had become abundant. There was a high level of Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Carbon in various forms. Hydrocarbons existed in plentiful but non-toxic supply.
There is no indication that Mars ever had this scenario. Though liquid water almost certainly existed on Mars in the distant past, it is most likely that it was highly sterile. So the problem isn't whether or not organisms exist that have the potential to survive somewhere on Mars, the problem is that Mars doesn't seem to have had a point in its history at which living organisms could arise.

"Life finds a way" Ian Malcolm mutters in the movie Jurassic Park. This may be true. But that is Life that is already here, not the genesis of Life itself.

My guess is, in the decades and centuries to come, as we discover more and more exoplanets that have terrestrial-like environments, or "Class M planets," we'll learn that only a tiny few had the necessary conditions for the arise of life. Most will be pleasant, but sterile. We will go there, or send our bacteria there, and we/they will thrive. But bacteria won't have ever arisen on those surprisingly habitable planets on their own. The conditions just weren't right.

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Cars That Drive Themselves, Ctd

2011-06-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

I've written a bunch already about driverless cars. So when Tyler Cowen has a column in the New York Times about it, my interest was piqued. Cowen highlights the impediments to switching society to driverless cars:

Enabling the development of driverless cars will require squadrons of lawyers because a variety of state, local and federal laws presume that a human being is operating the automobiles on our roads. No state has anything close to a functioning system to inspect whether the computers in driverless cars are in good working order, much as we routinely test emissions and brake lights. Ordinary laws change only if legislators make those revisions a priority. Yet the mundane political issues of the day often appear quite pressing, not to mention politically safer than enabling a new product that is likely to engender controversy.

Then he makes another important point on his blog:

[I]t is an interesting question why there is no popular movement to encourage driverless cars. Commuting costs are very high and borne by many people. You can get people to hate plastic bags, or worry about a birth certificate, but they won’t send a “pro-driverless car” postcard to their representatives. The political movement has many potential beneficiaries but few natural constituencies. (Why? Does it fail to connect to an us vs. them struggle?) This is an underrated source of bias in political outcomes.

I think the answer to his question is that handing over the keys to a robot seems to humans like a loss of freedom. Right now, people feel complete empowerment when they climb into the driver's seat of a vehicle. No longer is their "body" a 100 kilo meatsack. It is now ten times as large, bristling with power and electronics. Invictus runs through their head: "I am master of my fate, I am captain of my soul." And off they go, their Id now including a 16 foot aluminum exoskeleton on wheels they are now wearing.
Climbing into a car and helplessly sitting there while it ferries you about isn't empowering at all.
All this is a shame, really, because the price we pay for our pride is 35,000 dead Americans every year.

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Friday Poetry Burst

2011-05-27T07:59:00.000-05:00

The two boys lean out on the railing
of the front porch, looking up.
Behind them they can hear their mother
in one room watching “Name That Tune,”
their father in another watching
a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs
turned up high and higher till they
each can’t hear the other’s show.
The older boy is saying that no matter
how many stars you counted there were
always more stars beyond them
and beyond the stars black space
going on forever in all directions,
so that even if you flew up
millions and millions of years
you’d be no closer to the end
of it than they were now
here on the porch on Tuesday night
in the middle of summer.
The younger boy can think somehow
only of his mother’s closet,
how he likes to crawl in back
behind the heavy drapery
of shirts, nightgowns and dresses,
into the sheer black where
no matter how close he holds
his hand up to his face
there’s no hand ever, no
face to hold it to.

A woman from another street
is calling to her stray cat or dog,
clapping and whistling it in,
and farther away deep in the city
sirens now and again
veer in and out of hearing.

The boys edge closer, shoulder
to shoulder now, sad Ptolemies,
the older looking up, the younger
as he thinks back straight ahead
into the black leaves of the maple
where the street lights flicker
like another watery skein of stars.
“Name That Tune” and Walter Cronkite
struggle like rough water
to rise above each other.
And the woman now comes walking
in a nightgown down the middle
of the street, clapping and
whistling, while the older boy
goes on about what light years
are, and solar winds, black holes,
and how the sun is cooling
and what will happen to
them all when it is cold.

Astronomy Lesson, by Alan Shapiro, 1987

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