I love my really liberal friends but last night drove me absolutely bonkers. Hanging out in downtown Minneapolis for a birthday party for one of them, I was regaled with mouthfoaming about how all corporations are evil puppet masters who have hijacked Barack Obama's mind and soul, manipulating him into doing their nefarious bidding. Apparently, the Federal Reserve is behind it all.
Great.
After I took far more than I should, I posited that they don't sound any different than those moonbats on the far right and their evil government conspiracy theories. That made them very upset, offering several "Wow. Just wows" at my "naivete" at "how the world really works." One woman kept asking me over and over again if I knew just what the Federal Reserve really was. I replied that I did. When she asked for an explanation and I gave her one, she rolled her eyes and accused me of being "blind." Her boyfriend then described to me his theory that Barack Obama was taken aside after about a month in office and given his orders.
"Just look at the difference in his face after a few weeks in office. He went from young looking to ashen. Yeah, they told how it was."
"Who is they?" I asked.
"Ah, c'mon Mark, you know!!"
I still don't.
I tried to explain to them that I had been through all this in the 1990s, listening regularly to Art Bell and Coast to Coast. I still listen to it today but realize with the wisdom of my years that most of this stuff is just fictional garbage. More frustrating is the sad fact that people on the Right view all liberals as being this way. We are most decidedly not.
The whole night really kinda sucked because I was, once again, given a shining example of how when the left goes too far, they end up sounding like right wingers. Chem trails, the Bilderbergers, Monsanto, and a whole host of other moustache twirlers are all comin' to gin us!
Saturday, March 01, 2014
Friday, February 28, 2014
Conceal and Carry A Go Go
The Christian Science Monitor has a piece up about conceal and carry that is most excellent. It starts off with this story.
Charles Ingram and Robert Webster were neighbors in Florida, but friends said the two older men had little love for each other and often quarreled. On a spring day in 2010, the two men, both gun enthusiasts who had state permits to carry concealed weapons, got into another argument across their lawns.
This time, police later said, both men pulled out their weapons. When Mr. Webster began approaching, Mr. Ingram raised his gun, as did Webster. Two shots rang out simultaneously, and both men fell. Webster died almost instantly, Ingram less than a month later. That "Deadwood"-style neighborhood gunfight is one of 555 examples compiled by advocates of gun control detailing how the mere presence of legal guns can turn mundane moments into tragedies.
I think we are going to see a lot more of this as conceal carry numbers have risen dramatically in the last 20 years. Back then, there were less than a million. Now?
In a country that witnesses bloody gun violence of all kinds on a daily basis, Ingram and Webster were part of a growing cohort, a sort of standing militia of what concealed-carry advocates say are between 8 million and 11 million citizens carrying concealed guns in public in the name of protecting themselves and those around them.
Those around them...yeah, I don't need their fucking protection. They can take their fear, anger, hatred, and paranoia and shove it up their collective asses.
Complicating this rise of the concealed gun in America, new research on the psychology of what is called "embodied cognition" suggests that simply the act of holding a gun shades one's perceptions, sometimes at odds with reality. To opponents of concealed carry, such research suggests that a toxic mix of politics and paranoia, added to 30 ounces of chromed steel tucked legally under a belt at Wal-Mart, ultimately equals a scarier and more dangerous society.
Sounds pretty familiar to me. I wonder if this article will bounce off the gun blogger's bubble or if there will be some actual reflection. Thankfully, they aren't all like this.
"There is a certain psychology at work with some who carry openly or concealed," writes columnist Stephen Lemons, in the Phoenix New Times newspaper. "I have seen it in the nativist camp, where these grizzled old white extremists try to provoke their enemies with guns on their hips, itching to blast someone."
While that may be harsh, even some concealed-carry proponents see a strain of disturbing behavior among some carriers. "Acting like a deadly threat is imminent, walking around stores jerking your head around ... 'on a swivel,' planning your tactical movement from the gas pump to the cash register IS paranoid behavior, unless you live in Fallujah," writes one permit holder on a concealed-carry Internet forum. "Acting like every situation involves a critical threat is goofy.... Don't confuse life with movies."
Indeed.
Charles Ingram and Robert Webster were neighbors in Florida, but friends said the two older men had little love for each other and often quarreled. On a spring day in 2010, the two men, both gun enthusiasts who had state permits to carry concealed weapons, got into another argument across their lawns.
This time, police later said, both men pulled out their weapons. When Mr. Webster began approaching, Mr. Ingram raised his gun, as did Webster. Two shots rang out simultaneously, and both men fell. Webster died almost instantly, Ingram less than a month later. That "Deadwood"-style neighborhood gunfight is one of 555 examples compiled by advocates of gun control detailing how the mere presence of legal guns can turn mundane moments into tragedies.
I think we are going to see a lot more of this as conceal carry numbers have risen dramatically in the last 20 years. Back then, there were less than a million. Now?
In a country that witnesses bloody gun violence of all kinds on a daily basis, Ingram and Webster were part of a growing cohort, a sort of standing militia of what concealed-carry advocates say are between 8 million and 11 million citizens carrying concealed guns in public in the name of protecting themselves and those around them.
Those around them...yeah, I don't need their fucking protection. They can take their fear, anger, hatred, and paranoia and shove it up their collective asses.
Complicating this rise of the concealed gun in America, new research on the psychology of what is called "embodied cognition" suggests that simply the act of holding a gun shades one's perceptions, sometimes at odds with reality. To opponents of concealed carry, such research suggests that a toxic mix of politics and paranoia, added to 30 ounces of chromed steel tucked legally under a belt at Wal-Mart, ultimately equals a scarier and more dangerous society.
Sounds pretty familiar to me. I wonder if this article will bounce off the gun blogger's bubble or if there will be some actual reflection. Thankfully, they aren't all like this.
"There is a certain psychology at work with some who carry openly or concealed," writes columnist Stephen Lemons, in the Phoenix New Times newspaper. "I have seen it in the nativist camp, where these grizzled old white extremists try to provoke their enemies with guns on their hips, itching to blast someone."
While that may be harsh, even some concealed-carry proponents see a strain of disturbing behavior among some carriers. "Acting like a deadly threat is imminent, walking around stores jerking your head around ... 'on a swivel,' planning your tactical movement from the gas pump to the cash register IS paranoid behavior, unless you live in Fallujah," writes one permit holder on a concealed-carry Internet forum. "Acting like every situation involves a critical threat is goofy.... Don't confuse life with movies."
Indeed.
America Is Not In Decline
Dovetailing quite nicely with Kurtzman's Second American Century is this piece from Politico magazine by Sean Starrs. Our continual and often hyperbolic obsession with "America's decline" really can be most hysterical and irrational.
It all started with a wave of declinism in the 1980s, set off by the rise of Japan. Then the doom and gloom suddenly vanished amid the triumphalism of the 1990s, which transformed the United States into the world’s only superpower. After the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, many thought “empire” was a better moniker, with the United States apparently able to reshape world order virtually at will. And then just a few years later — poof! — declinism returned with a vengeance, with American power supposedly crashing like the latest Hollywood reality queen. China supplanted Japan as a hegemon on the rise, and the biggest global financial crisis since 1929 — emanating from the United States itself — was allegedly the final nail in the coffin of the American century.
This really is an issue that both parties are guilty of having their heads up their asses. Recently and in the same day, Bubba T and my ultra libertarian/rabid Randian brother in law both foamed at the mouth about how America is doomed. I realized how similar the far left and the far right sound when they are shrill:) But this is exactly what Starrs is talking about in this piece. For example, the metric by which we measure Chinese power is flawed.
China, for example, has been the world’s largest electronics exporter since 2004, and yet this does not at all mean that Chinese firms are world leaders in electronics. Even though China has a virtual monopoly on the export of iPhones, for instance, it is Apple that reaps the majority of profits from iPhone sales. More broadly, more than three-quarters of the top 200 exporting firms from China are actually foreign, not Chinese. This is totally different from the prior rise of Japan, propelled by Japanese firms producing in Japan and exporting abroad.
In the age of globalization, we can't measure a country's economic power in the same way.
It all started with a wave of declinism in the 1980s, set off by the rise of Japan. Then the doom and gloom suddenly vanished amid the triumphalism of the 1990s, which transformed the United States into the world’s only superpower. After the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, many thought “empire” was a better moniker, with the United States apparently able to reshape world order virtually at will. And then just a few years later — poof! — declinism returned with a vengeance, with American power supposedly crashing like the latest Hollywood reality queen. China supplanted Japan as a hegemon on the rise, and the biggest global financial crisis since 1929 — emanating from the United States itself — was allegedly the final nail in the coffin of the American century.
This really is an issue that both parties are guilty of having their heads up their asses. Recently and in the same day, Bubba T and my ultra libertarian/rabid Randian brother in law both foamed at the mouth about how America is doomed. I realized how similar the far left and the far right sound when they are shrill:) But this is exactly what Starrs is talking about in this piece. For example, the metric by which we measure Chinese power is flawed.
China, for example, has been the world’s largest electronics exporter since 2004, and yet this does not at all mean that Chinese firms are world leaders in electronics. Even though China has a virtual monopoly on the export of iPhones, for instance, it is Apple that reaps the majority of profits from iPhone sales. More broadly, more than three-quarters of the top 200 exporting firms from China are actually foreign, not Chinese. This is totally different from the prior rise of Japan, propelled by Japanese firms producing in Japan and exporting abroad.
In the age of globalization, we can't measure a country's economic power in the same way.
What Did The World's Fair of 2014 Look Like 50 Years Ago?
Issac Asimov was pretty accurate when he predicted what the world would look like in 50 years. Check out one of his prognostications.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
Exactly what they look like now. The whole piece is amazing. Read it!
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
Exactly what they look like now. The whole piece is amazing. Read it!
Thursday, February 27, 2014
A Generation Lost To Fox News
Edwin Lyngar discusses how he lost his father to conservative rage via Fox News. Thrashing hysteria indeed. Some of the highlights.
I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.
Incalculable levels of conservative rage...I wonder if he has ever checked out any right wing blogs:)
I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it. What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.
I was the same way when I watched Fox News after 9-11. They thrive on anger and fear but it's not just them. Conservative media as a whole is patterned after the Fox model.
Truly, this is a sad piece. As Lyngar notes, his father's generation are "a wounded and thrashing legacy of white hegemony." This is why they act the way they do. They are afraid.
I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.
Incalculable levels of conservative rage...I wonder if he has ever checked out any right wing blogs:)
I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it. What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.
I was the same way when I watched Fox News after 9-11. They thrive on anger and fear but it's not just them. Conservative media as a whole is patterned after the Fox model.
Truly, this is a sad piece. As Lyngar notes, his father's generation are "a wounded and thrashing legacy of white hegemony." This is why they act the way they do. They are afraid.
Good Words
Many Americans warmly smiled when former first lady Barbara Bush said “I love Bill Clinton.” The respect and affection between former presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush is genuine and very American. It hearkens back to an Americanism dating back to the early republic of Jefferson and Adams, which voters would greatly value today, when political opponents collaborated with mutual respect to advance national interests.
The mudslinging attack by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) against Clinton is a textbook case of why Kamikaze Republicans lost national elections in 2006, 2008 and 2012. Voters are disgusted by this lowball brand of GOP politics, practiced by politicians who look mean, shallow and small against a former president who is widely liked, admired and respected. Ditto for Republicans addicted to what I recently called their “Benghazi disease,” which has left former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton towering above potential Republican opponents in polling for the 2016 presidential race.
--Brent Budowsky, The Hill
In addition to voters being disgusted by these sorts of attacks, they also don't take a shine to the far right. The Republicans have a chance to make some real gains this year. Will they be able to resist the catnip of going full on moonbat as they have done in the past four elections?
The mudslinging attack by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) against Clinton is a textbook case of why Kamikaze Republicans lost national elections in 2006, 2008 and 2012. Voters are disgusted by this lowball brand of GOP politics, practiced by politicians who look mean, shallow and small against a former president who is widely liked, admired and respected. Ditto for Republicans addicted to what I recently called their “Benghazi disease,” which has left former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton towering above potential Republican opponents in polling for the 2016 presidential race.
--Brent Budowsky, The Hill
In addition to voters being disgusted by these sorts of attacks, they also don't take a shine to the far right. The Republicans have a chance to make some real gains this year. Will they be able to resist the catnip of going full on moonbat as they have done in the past four elections?
The Second American Century
Joel Kurtzman, former Editor in Chief of the Harvard Business Review, recently posted a great summation of his new book, Unleashing the Second American Century: Four Forces for Economic Dominance. Looks like I am going to need this book ASAP.
The core of his argument is optimism. Despite the continual drudge of negative views of the future of our country, we are indeed poised to continue our hegemonic dominance of the world. Kurtzman posits that because of the following four reasons, the future is looking very, very bright for you country.
American Creativity
Manufacturing Renaissance
An Energy Bonanza
Abundant Capital
He offers brief summations of each of these reasons in the linked post above. I'll be taking about this book as I read it, thus the new tag called "Second American Cenutry."
If I were a political party in this country (hint hint), I would jump on the Kurtzman bandwagon right now. Optimism always wins the day over anger, hatred, and fear.
The core of his argument is optimism. Despite the continual drudge of negative views of the future of our country, we are indeed poised to continue our hegemonic dominance of the world. Kurtzman posits that because of the following four reasons, the future is looking very, very bright for you country.
American Creativity
Manufacturing Renaissance
An Energy Bonanza
Abundant Capital
He offers brief summations of each of these reasons in the linked post above. I'll be taking about this book as I read it, thus the new tag called "Second American Cenutry."
If I were a political party in this country (hint hint), I would jump on the Kurtzman bandwagon right now. Optimism always wins the day over anger, hatred, and fear.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
A Tool-Using Fun-Loving Crow
There's been a long debate over what differentiates us from animals. Some say it's self-awareness, some say it's language, some say it's tool use, and so on.
Here's a hilarious example of a crow that demonstrates two very human qualities: tool use and having fun.
Why did the crow decide to do this? It seems unlikely someone would have gone to the effort of training it. Did it see some kids sledding down a hill and copy them? Or did it slide down a roof one day and find that it was fun but kind of rough on the tootsies, so it looked for something to sit on to prevent chafing?
Crows have long been known to be quite intelligent, able to count up to at least five, use tools and recognize human faces. Squirrels and scrub jays have a "theory of mind:" they know that if other animals see them hide food that they'll have to come back and move it. There have been parrots with large vocabularies, the ability to count and the intellectual and emotional capacity of young human children. There's a border collie that knows the names of hundreds of objects and can perform fairly complex commands with them. Dolphins exhibit self awareness. Apes like Koko and Kanzi can communicate with humans using sign language or computer lexigrams, and Koko even wanted pet kittens.
Pet owners can describe any number of seemingly intelligent behaviors that their charges exhibit; most of these are likely due to repetition and anthropomorphization, but the undeniable conclusion is that animals can form a strong two-way emotional bond with humans that extends beyond a trained Pavlovian response.
From these examples it's clear that some animals have expressed each of the abilities that comprise human cognition. Humans are the only creatures that assemble the whole package into what we call intelligence.
Intelligence is not an either-or proposition: it's a continuum with a huge variation among individuals of the same species.
Here's a hilarious example of a crow that demonstrates two very human qualities: tool use and having fun.
Why did the crow decide to do this? It seems unlikely someone would have gone to the effort of training it. Did it see some kids sledding down a hill and copy them? Or did it slide down a roof one day and find that it was fun but kind of rough on the tootsies, so it looked for something to sit on to prevent chafing?
Crows have long been known to be quite intelligent, able to count up to at least five, use tools and recognize human faces. Squirrels and scrub jays have a "theory of mind:" they know that if other animals see them hide food that they'll have to come back and move it. There have been parrots with large vocabularies, the ability to count and the intellectual and emotional capacity of young human children. There's a border collie that knows the names of hundreds of objects and can perform fairly complex commands with them. Dolphins exhibit self awareness. Apes like Koko and Kanzi can communicate with humans using sign language or computer lexigrams, and Koko even wanted pet kittens.
Pet owners can describe any number of seemingly intelligent behaviors that their charges exhibit; most of these are likely due to repetition and anthropomorphization, but the undeniable conclusion is that animals can form a strong two-way emotional bond with humans that extends beyond a trained Pavlovian response.
From these examples it's clear that some animals have expressed each of the abilities that comprise human cognition. Humans are the only creatures that assemble the whole package into what we call intelligence.
Intelligence is not an either-or proposition: it's a continuum with a huge variation among individuals of the same species.
Death Knell for Bitcoin?
Mt. Gox, the main bitcoin exchange, will apparently declare bankruptcy. The exchange was robbed of 740,000 bitcoins, "worth" $350-400 million. The exchange rate for bitcoin is now about $580, down from over $1,200 a few months ago.
How did this happen? The main problem with digital currency is that it's just a string of bits that can be copied any number of times. Since you can potentially use the same bitcoin to buy stuff from 10, 1,000 or a million different people, you need some mechanism to prevent that:
HENN: In the conventional banking system - trusted third parties, like banks and credit card companies - keep ledgers to make sure I can't do that. But bitcoin solved this problem by creating a public record of every transaction. So if I buy something from you with a bitcoin, a record of that transaction is shared and recorded across the entire bitcoin network - everyone knows.The main draw of bitcoin is that there's no governing central authority keeping track. This is also the main drawback of bitcoin: there's no governing central authority keeping track, or protecting or insuring you. The people whose bitcoins were stolen have no recourse. There's no FDIC insurance. Unlike the Target credit card number theft, there's no Visa or Mastercard to shield consumers from losses. There's utterly no way to track down who ripped off Mt. Gox and their customers: anonymity is the entire point of bitcoin.
The theory is that public ledger make it impossible for me to spend a bitcoin twice. Because after I spent it, everyone would know that coin was actually yours. You know, one of the appeals of this system is that it eliminates those trusted third parties, those banks and credit card companies, and at least in theory could make moving money around the world much, much cheaper.
BLOCK: OK. But wait, Steve. If you're telling me that every transaction is supposed to be recorded in a publicly-shared ledger, right, how does it happen that thieves could apparently manage to steal, what you say, could be $350 or $400 million from this exchange, Mt. Gox?
HENN: Well, that's a great question. So sharing and recording all these transactions on the bitcoin network it turns out takes some time. So for this and a couple other reasons, the community developed kind of a short-cut: A temporary ID number that would be attached to each transaction and making tracking transactions in the short-term easier. But these temporary ID numbers can be faked.
Apparently people were approaching Mt. Gox with fake ID numbers, telling the exchange they hadn't received the bitcoins they were owed. And then Mt. Gox was relying on these numbers and giving the thieves real bitcoins. This may well have drained Mt. Gox's resources to the point were it's now insolvent.
The impetus for using bitcoin for legal transactions is a little hazy. When you buy something on the Internet you still need it sent to your house. That's hardly anonymous: the seller has to keep computerized records of your address, so your anonymity is only protected by how careful and competent your supplier is. Even if you're buying something digital, like porn, it still has to come to you over the Internet, which after the NSA spying scandal turns out to be not very anonymous.
If you're concerned about hiding transactions from your spouse (like a surprise birthday gift, or that porn bill), you can often pay through a PayPal or similar account, which is a lot easier to keep secret than a joint credit card.
Anything you buy in person can be bought with cash, which is even more anonymous than bitcoin because it doesn't require any computers or connection to the Internet. Using it won't leave any digital footprints that lead the NSA back to your door, and your spouse won't find it in the browser history that you forgot to clear.
At this point, bitcoin is the domain of drug dealers, gun runners, money launderers and crooks. But there's another den of thieves itching to get in on the action.
Barry Silbert, of SecondMarket, is in discussions with several banks to create an exchange to trade bitcoins. Only large institutions would be allowed to join. Some of these same institutions advised their clients to invest in bogus CDOs while betting against those same financial instruments; they gambled away trillions of dollars on bad real estate deals and trashed the world economy. What could possibly go wrong when they start advising their clients to invest in the totally unregulated market of bitcoin futures?
Maybe someday there will be a reliable digital currency that has the virtues of bitcoin but none of the problems. But today's digital currencies are little different from the gold players create in World of Warcraft -- which when I checked today had an exchange rate of $12.80 for 10,000 gold. Not quite bitcoin territory, but what can you expect for killing a bunch of orcs? And the crazy thing is that bitcoins are created in essentially the same way: just crunching numbers on a computer.
The bitcoin market is like the Wild West, only there are no Earp brothers or Texas Rangers. It's just a bunch of crooks and their libertarian tech geek enablers. Since a huge percentage of Mt. Gox's customers are criminals dealing in drugs and money laundering, it's no surprise they were robbed blind.
When you sleep with dogs you get fleas.
A Massive Eugenics Program?
I was reading this conversation on the New York Times about why theists believe in gods. The first order answer is simple: the vast majority of people believe in gods because they were brought up to do so.
But why, when there's utterly no physical evidence whatsoever that gods act in the real world, are we so easily convinced of the existence of a super Santa who keeps track of who's naughty and who's nice? The answer might be found in evolutionary biology.
For literally thousands of years of humanity has been conducting one pogrom after another against people who don't believe in god. The Egyptians deified pharaohs as living gods and forced their subjects to worship them. The Romans required citizens to pay obeisance to their deities. Christians hounded pagans across Europe to convert, and killed those would not. Muslims scoured Asia, Europe and North Africa and forced infidels to convert or die.
American settlers killed countless Indians through disease and war. The remaining few had their religion, culture, and their very names stripped away when the government sent their children away to Christian boarding schools.
Many conservative Christians deny the existence of evolution. But they know from personal experience that you can breed desirable traits into domesticated animals, and eliminate the undesirable traits.
For millennia most of the world has been conducting an intensive selective breeding program to cull non-believers from their ranks. How long would it take this kind of selection to result in physical changes in the brain that predispose people to believe in the existence of supernatural beings? Some researchers believe there is a "god spot" in the brain; has that structure in the brain been bred to be more prominent over thousands of years by believers?
When you factor in the commandments of so many religions, including Catholicism and Mormonism, to have large families, the admonitions of Catholicism to eschew birth control, and Islam encouraging men to have multiple wives, it's clear that they're trying to inflate their numbers on the supply side as well.
So you gotta wonder: is religion a massive eugenics experiment?
But why, when there's utterly no physical evidence whatsoever that gods act in the real world, are we so easily convinced of the existence of a super Santa who keeps track of who's naughty and who's nice? The answer might be found in evolutionary biology.
For literally thousands of years of humanity has been conducting one pogrom after another against people who don't believe in god. The Egyptians deified pharaohs as living gods and forced their subjects to worship them. The Romans required citizens to pay obeisance to their deities. Christians hounded pagans across Europe to convert, and killed those would not. Muslims scoured Asia, Europe and North Africa and forced infidels to convert or die.
American settlers killed countless Indians through disease and war. The remaining few had their religion, culture, and their very names stripped away when the government sent their children away to Christian boarding schools.
Many conservative Christians deny the existence of evolution. But they know from personal experience that you can breed desirable traits into domesticated animals, and eliminate the undesirable traits.
For millennia most of the world has been conducting an intensive selective breeding program to cull non-believers from their ranks. How long would it take this kind of selection to result in physical changes in the brain that predispose people to believe in the existence of supernatural beings? Some researchers believe there is a "god spot" in the brain; has that structure in the brain been bred to be more prominent over thousands of years by believers?
When you factor in the commandments of so many religions, including Catholicism and Mormonism, to have large families, the admonitions of Catholicism to eschew birth control, and Islam encouraging men to have multiple wives, it's clear that they're trying to inflate their numbers on the supply side as well.
So you gotta wonder: is religion a massive eugenics experiment?
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Your Own Spaceship
Have you ever wanted to cruise the solar system, see the rings of Saturn, ride the moons of Jupiter? There's a freeware application for Windows called Celestia that lets you do that, virtually. (It's available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/, and addons are available at http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/).
Celestia lets you position yourself almost anywhere in the universe and shows you what you would see. You can put yourself in orbit around Saturn, following its moon Mimas, or Mars, or Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri, or Cygnus X1, one of the first black holes astronomers discovered.
Celestia is basically a planetarium application that frees you from the constraints of the terracentric viewpoint most such programs impose. You can position yourself anywhere and easily change the angle you're looking from, zooming in and out. You can reverse time, speed it up, slow it down, watching the moon go through its phases as it orbits the earth, or the Galilean moons zip around Jupiter like moths around a flame. You can turn on your virtual spacecraft's thrusters and zoom around the solar system at the speed of light. Celestia also displays man-made objects, such as the International Space Station. It will also find the dates of solar and lunar eclipses and display the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface so that you can tell where the eclipse can be seen from.
Though Celestia feels like a game, it's rooted in science. It has been used by NASA and the European Space Agency, and several universities and schools to teach astronomy. Its graphics aren't on par with what professional artists can produce with their high-powered graphics workstations, but hey, it's free!
This photo album shows images of Earth, Mars, Jupiter, its moon IO, and the Discovery spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey (but no monolith, alas), the Atlantis space shuttle, the International Space Station, Saturn and its moon Mimas, and the galaxy M83.
But the coolest part about Celestia is that you can add your own images and objects, and a lot of people have done exactly that. Celestia Motherlode is a repository of addons that people around the world have created. Enthusiasts have created addons depicting stars, planets and spacecraft from real life and scientific conjecture, as well as numerous fictional sources such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, Niven's Known Space, Star Wars, etc.
The most detailed fictional creations are from the Orion's Arm Universe Project, a worldbuilding project where hundreds of people around the world have collaborated to create a future history in which mankind has spread out across the galaxy.
To test customization out myself, I made my own texture for the moon, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tick. A texture is just computerspeak for a flat JPEG image that is wrapped around 3D objects by graphics programs. Here's the resulting video:
If you want to create your own addons for Celestia there's quite a learning curve, but there are a lot of resources on the Internet that give all the details. You don't really have to know orbital mechanics to make your own creations; you just have to be able to cut and paste text files. To make your own alternate surface textures for planets and moons you'll need a graphics program (The Gimp is a good freeware one, despite the name). To make your own 3D objects, you'll need a 3D editing program (Blender is an amazingly sophisticated freeware application). Be warned: making 3D objects is big job if you don't already know how to do it.
For a long time it seemed that the dream of mankind going into space was dead. But the reach for space is finally getting rolling again: countries like China, India, Japan are joining the United States, Russia and Europe with serious space programs that are conducting real science. Companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are pioneering private launch services. Entertainment ventures like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and the Mars One project (the one-way trip to Mars planned for the 2020s) may never come to fruition, but the dream is alive and people are taking space very seriously.
And Celestia will give you a little preview of what we'll see out there.
 |
| Saturn and Mimas |
Celestia is basically a planetarium application that frees you from the constraints of the terracentric viewpoint most such programs impose. You can position yourself anywhere and easily change the angle you're looking from, zooming in and out. You can reverse time, speed it up, slow it down, watching the moon go through its phases as it orbits the earth, or the Galilean moons zip around Jupiter like moths around a flame. You can turn on your virtual spacecraft's thrusters and zoom around the solar system at the speed of light. Celestia also displays man-made objects, such as the International Space Station. It will also find the dates of solar and lunar eclipses and display the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface so that you can tell where the eclipse can be seen from.
Though Celestia feels like a game, it's rooted in science. It has been used by NASA and the European Space Agency, and several universities and schools to teach astronomy. Its graphics aren't on par with what professional artists can produce with their high-powered graphics workstations, but hey, it's free!
This photo album shows images of Earth, Mars, Jupiter, its moon IO, and the Discovery spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey (but no monolith, alas), the Atlantis space shuttle, the International Space Station, Saturn and its moon Mimas, and the galaxy M83.
But the coolest part about Celestia is that you can add your own images and objects, and a lot of people have done exactly that. Celestia Motherlode is a repository of addons that people around the world have created. Enthusiasts have created addons depicting stars, planets and spacecraft from real life and scientific conjecture, as well as numerous fictional sources such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, Niven's Known Space, Star Wars, etc.
The most detailed fictional creations are from the Orion's Arm Universe Project, a worldbuilding project where hundreds of people around the world have collaborated to create a future history in which mankind has spread out across the galaxy.
To test customization out myself, I made my own texture for the moon, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tick. A texture is just computerspeak for a flat JPEG image that is wrapped around 3D objects by graphics programs. Here's the resulting video:
If you want to create your own addons for Celestia there's quite a learning curve, but there are a lot of resources on the Internet that give all the details. You don't really have to know orbital mechanics to make your own creations; you just have to be able to cut and paste text files. To make your own alternate surface textures for planets and moons you'll need a graphics program (The Gimp is a good freeware one, despite the name). To make your own 3D objects, you'll need a 3D editing program (Blender is an amazingly sophisticated freeware application). Be warned: making 3D objects is big job if you don't already know how to do it.
For a long time it seemed that the dream of mankind going into space was dead. But the reach for space is finally getting rolling again: countries like China, India, Japan are joining the United States, Russia and Europe with serious space programs that are conducting real science. Companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are pioneering private launch services. Entertainment ventures like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and the Mars One project (the one-way trip to Mars planned for the 2020s) may never come to fruition, but the dream is alive and people are taking space very seriously.
And Celestia will give you a little preview of what we'll see out there.
Keynes and Hayek A Go Go
A recent discussion in comments reminded me of this piece from a while back that I never posted. There were a couple of good points in it.
The problem with the Hayekian position is that it’s relentlessly negative: spending doesn’t work, stimulus doesn’t work, all we can do is suffer a nasty bout of deflation and trust in the invisible hand to eventually get us back to work again.
Right. Then, there was this highly familiar point...
For the Hayekians, the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth was particularly revealing: she would take a question about rescuing the financial system and duck it by talking about how rescuing the auto industry was a bad idea. Or she would ridicule high-speed rail by saying that no one wants to take the train from New York to L.A.—a route that precisely no one is proposing. In other words, the Hayekians were more comfortable with straw men than with messy reality.
Pretty much sums up every discussion I've every had with these sorts of folks.
But I remembered that the main reason why I didn't is that is seemed far too bipolar. The answer isn't always simply "Keynes" or "Hayek." In fact, in the current age of globalization, neither fully apply. I've always been one to take a more constructivist approach to any issue of the day. New ideas that are people driven, not "school of thought" driven. For example, both liberalism and realism completely failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. They didn't figure that Gorbachev would simply give up and call it a day. Is there an economist out there or world leader who will finally leave behind both Keynsian economics as well as the theories of Friedrich Hayek? In my view, it's long overdue. How does one stimulate aggregate demand when we have a world economy? This implies that all of the world's governments would have to act in concert to achieve this end and, given the reality of the international stage and conflicting interests, this hardly seems likely.
And there are far too many misconceptions about John Maynard Keynes that have sadly taken root. The thing that people forget about Keynes is that only called for increased government spending in times of contraction. When economies were doing well, he did call for austerity and reduced spending. The anti-spending anaphylactics tend to forget that. These same people also forget that Ronald Reagan was a Keynsian by both cutting taxes (which increases aggregate demand) and increasing spending. "I'm not worried about the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself," he once quipped. Richard Nixon famously said, "We are all Keynsians now" and, to a certain extent, he was right.
My biggest beef with Hayekians is that can't point to a real world example of how his theories work in practice. Like the libertarian fantasists, where was the utopia of which they dream? How would it work today, given globalization? Certainly, they can point to austerity measures taken during boom times but that's honestly Keynes, not Hayek. The reality is Hayekians just don't like the government. Their emotions about it have clouded their judgment and inhibited them from seeing that different circumstances dictate different paths of solutions.
Sometimes you can't plug a square peg into a round hole. Shocking, I know!
The problem with the Hayekian position is that it’s relentlessly negative: spending doesn’t work, stimulus doesn’t work, all we can do is suffer a nasty bout of deflation and trust in the invisible hand to eventually get us back to work again.
Right. Then, there was this highly familiar point...
For the Hayekians, the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth was particularly revealing: she would take a question about rescuing the financial system and duck it by talking about how rescuing the auto industry was a bad idea. Or she would ridicule high-speed rail by saying that no one wants to take the train from New York to L.A.—a route that precisely no one is proposing. In other words, the Hayekians were more comfortable with straw men than with messy reality.
Pretty much sums up every discussion I've every had with these sorts of folks.
But I remembered that the main reason why I didn't is that is seemed far too bipolar. The answer isn't always simply "Keynes" or "Hayek." In fact, in the current age of globalization, neither fully apply. I've always been one to take a more constructivist approach to any issue of the day. New ideas that are people driven, not "school of thought" driven. For example, both liberalism and realism completely failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. They didn't figure that Gorbachev would simply give up and call it a day. Is there an economist out there or world leader who will finally leave behind both Keynsian economics as well as the theories of Friedrich Hayek? In my view, it's long overdue. How does one stimulate aggregate demand when we have a world economy? This implies that all of the world's governments would have to act in concert to achieve this end and, given the reality of the international stage and conflicting interests, this hardly seems likely.
And there are far too many misconceptions about John Maynard Keynes that have sadly taken root. The thing that people forget about Keynes is that only called for increased government spending in times of contraction. When economies were doing well, he did call for austerity and reduced spending. The anti-spending anaphylactics tend to forget that. These same people also forget that Ronald Reagan was a Keynsian by both cutting taxes (which increases aggregate demand) and increasing spending. "I'm not worried about the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself," he once quipped. Richard Nixon famously said, "We are all Keynsians now" and, to a certain extent, he was right.
My biggest beef with Hayekians is that can't point to a real world example of how his theories work in practice. Like the libertarian fantasists, where was the utopia of which they dream? How would it work today, given globalization? Certainly, they can point to austerity measures taken during boom times but that's honestly Keynes, not Hayek. The reality is Hayekians just don't like the government. Their emotions about it have clouded their judgment and inhibited them from seeing that different circumstances dictate different paths of solutions.
Sometimes you can't plug a square peg into a round hole. Shocking, I know!
Monday, February 24, 2014
Spokesman For Science
Great piece in the Times about how Alan Alda is working to improve the way scientists communicate with us ordinary folk. Why?
That scientists often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity. They sometimes spray information at us without making that contact that I think is crucial. If a scientist doesn’t have someone next to them, drawing them out, they can easily go into lecture mode. There can be a lot of insider’s jargon. If they can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances. They won’t fund science. How are scientists going to get money from policy makers, if our leaders and legislators can’t understand what they do? I heard from one member of Congress that at a meeting with scientists, the members were passing notes to one another: “Do you know what this guy is saying?” “No, do you?”
Agreed and exactly why we have the problem we do with climate change.
Of course, that's why I think more scientists should run for Congress!
That scientists often don’t speak to the rest of us the way they would if we were standing there full of curiosity. They sometimes spray information at us without making that contact that I think is crucial. If a scientist doesn’t have someone next to them, drawing them out, they can easily go into lecture mode. There can be a lot of insider’s jargon. If they can’t make clear what their work involves, the public will resist advances. They won’t fund science. How are scientists going to get money from policy makers, if our leaders and legislators can’t understand what they do? I heard from one member of Congress that at a meeting with scientists, the members were passing notes to one another: “Do you know what this guy is saying?” “No, do you?”
Agreed and exactly why we have the problem we do with climate change.
Of course, that's why I think more scientists should run for Congress!
Subdividing the Denial Camp
The video Mark posted divides the American people into six camps on climate change. One of the camps, however, needs to be broken up into two distinct subgroups: those who deny climate change but know it is happening and want it to happen, and the suckers who believe them.
The first subgroup is lying about it because they stand to rake in trillions of dollars in oil and gas revenues. This group includes oil company executives like the Koch brothers, people like Sarah Palin and anyone in Congress who gets money from oil companies.
The Koch brothers aren't stupid. They understand and appreciate science (David Koch is a major funder of the PBS program Nova), including climate science. They know that the ice is retreating from the arctic more and more each year. They know because arctic warming is melting the permafrost under their roads, oil rigs and pipelines, raising havoc with the foundations of their drilling operations.
But in the long run, they see global warming as a good thing: the warmer Alaska and Canada get, the easier it will be to extract the oil from the Arctic. Right now extracting oil up there a real bitch: they only have a couple of months a year for exploration because the seas get so rough and the weather gets so bad. But they know that the deposits elsewhere in the world will quickly run dry, what with countries like China and India increasing demand, and they want to get in on the ground floor in the Arctic regions. Gotta beat the Russians!
And an ice-free Northwest Passage would be great for commerce: it'll be so much easier to send Canadian oil to China!
Sarah Palin lives in Alaska, so she should know as well as anyone that Alaska is getting a lot warmer fast. But living in such a cold place is not a lot of fun, despite what she says on her TV shows, so she'd really prefer it 20 degrees warmer.
Other mining concerns stand to benefit hugely if the ice sheet on Greenland melts: there are massive deposits of minerals, including aluminum and uranium, in Greenland, and potentially a great deal of oil. The people of Greenland, all 50,000 of them, would like to get money from that mining, be able to grow their own food, and be independent of Denmark.
How can these guys reconcile the fact that they know they're trashing the climate, hurting billions of people in the next several decades? First and foremost, they just don't care. This is the typical reaction you get from a lot of people — but especially conservatives — when you point out terrible injustice or serious consequences of what they're doing.
Tell them that voter ID will prevent minorities, the elderly and students from voting: they don't care. Tell them that polar bears will go extinct: they don't care. Tell them that Kiribati will be drowned: they don't care. Tell them that Florida will lose all those beaches: they don't care. Tell them that higher sea levels will cause storm surges on the Atlantic coast to drastically increase storm damage: they don't care. Tell them that Manhattan will be inundated: they don't care, and would love it if all of New York disappeared.
They may say they don't believe that the ill effects you speak of are happening, and they may rationalize it away by saying "we need to increase confidence in the integrity of the voting process," or "species of animals go extinct all the time: just look at the dinosaurs," but the reality is that they just don't care, or they want it to happen.
They should care in the case of global warming, because it will hurt this country in the pocketbook with increased insurance rates, decreased crop yields, higher food prices, more tropical diseases, more powerful storms, bigger defense budgets trying to deal with the warfare that droughts, floods and famines in other countries will produce.
But climate deniers are like smokers. "Yeah, I know smoking will kill me eventually. But since I like smoking and I don't want to make the effort to quit, I'll just take my chances. Maybe I'll get hit by a bus before lung cancer kills me. So why bother to quit smoking, or get daily exercise, or eat right?"
Replace "smoking " with "climate change," "lung cancer" with "drought, famine, floods, and war" and "quitting, exercise and eating right" with "developing renewable energy sources" and you have encapsulated the mindset of the climate change deniers.
Another coping mechanism is rationalizing that we'll just adapt. "People can just move. We'll find a way to stop if it does happen. Human ingenuity trumps all." They just don't seem to get that using ingenuity sooner rather than later would save a whole lot of trouble, money and lives.
Perhaps the most foolish rationalization possible is that "God won't let it happen. He promised." Yeah, and every football team that huddles in prayer before the big game wins, right?
Then there are the "we can't be the first" and "it's not all our fault" rationalizations. This argument goes: since China is emitting the most CO2 now, we don't have to do anything -- even though in 2009 we burned four times more fossil fuel per capita than China.
Then there's uncertainty: some climate change deniers like the Koch brothers are well-versed in science. They know that climate change predictions are difficult, and any number of things could cause the planet to cool if they happened. There is natural variation in climate, and maybe we'll luck out and it'll kick when we need it most. If a giant volcano blows up, the planet would be cooled down. If a sizable asteroid hit the planet, we'd have a nuclear winter. If solar output mysteriously drops, the temperature could plummet.
But doing nothing because such unpredictable -- and terribly destructive -- things might happen is the worst kind of wishful thinking. It's like speeding toward an intersection and closing your eyes when the light turns yellow.
The last refuge of these scoundrels is not patriotism, but money. "Even if everything you say is true, it'll cost too much to do anything about climate change." This is essentially what the few reputable climate scientists that the Koch brothers' claim as their own have said. They admit it's happening, but there's just too much political and economic inertia to do anything about it. "We'll just have to make the best of it."
The climate change deniers of today are like the smokers of the Sixties. They know what they're doing is bad, but can't kick the habit. But as the scientific evidence that smoking caused disease kept piling up, and more people got tired of breathing second-hand smoke, smoking started to be banned most everywhere: planes, restaurants, bars, even outside public buildings.
The problem is that climate change deniers can't smoke in the privacy of their own homes: their CO2 winds up in the same atmosphere that shapes the climate that we all live in.
The first subgroup is lying about it because they stand to rake in trillions of dollars in oil and gas revenues. This group includes oil company executives like the Koch brothers, people like Sarah Palin and anyone in Congress who gets money from oil companies.
The Koch brothers aren't stupid. They understand and appreciate science (David Koch is a major funder of the PBS program Nova), including climate science. They know that the ice is retreating from the arctic more and more each year. They know because arctic warming is melting the permafrost under their roads, oil rigs and pipelines, raising havoc with the foundations of their drilling operations.
But in the long run, they see global warming as a good thing: the warmer Alaska and Canada get, the easier it will be to extract the oil from the Arctic. Right now extracting oil up there a real bitch: they only have a couple of months a year for exploration because the seas get so rough and the weather gets so bad. But they know that the deposits elsewhere in the world will quickly run dry, what with countries like China and India increasing demand, and they want to get in on the ground floor in the Arctic regions. Gotta beat the Russians!
And an ice-free Northwest Passage would be great for commerce: it'll be so much easier to send Canadian oil to China!
Sarah Palin lives in Alaska, so she should know as well as anyone that Alaska is getting a lot warmer fast. But living in such a cold place is not a lot of fun, despite what she says on her TV shows, so she'd really prefer it 20 degrees warmer.
Other mining concerns stand to benefit hugely if the ice sheet on Greenland melts: there are massive deposits of minerals, including aluminum and uranium, in Greenland, and potentially a great deal of oil. The people of Greenland, all 50,000 of them, would like to get money from that mining, be able to grow their own food, and be independent of Denmark.
How can these guys reconcile the fact that they know they're trashing the climate, hurting billions of people in the next several decades? First and foremost, they just don't care. This is the typical reaction you get from a lot of people — but especially conservatives — when you point out terrible injustice or serious consequences of what they're doing.
Tell them that voter ID will prevent minorities, the elderly and students from voting: they don't care. Tell them that polar bears will go extinct: they don't care. Tell them that Kiribati will be drowned: they don't care. Tell them that Florida will lose all those beaches: they don't care. Tell them that higher sea levels will cause storm surges on the Atlantic coast to drastically increase storm damage: they don't care. Tell them that Manhattan will be inundated: they don't care, and would love it if all of New York disappeared.
They may say they don't believe that the ill effects you speak of are happening, and they may rationalize it away by saying "we need to increase confidence in the integrity of the voting process," or "species of animals go extinct all the time: just look at the dinosaurs," but the reality is that they just don't care, or they want it to happen.
They should care in the case of global warming, because it will hurt this country in the pocketbook with increased insurance rates, decreased crop yields, higher food prices, more tropical diseases, more powerful storms, bigger defense budgets trying to deal with the warfare that droughts, floods and famines in other countries will produce.
But climate deniers are like smokers. "Yeah, I know smoking will kill me eventually. But since I like smoking and I don't want to make the effort to quit, I'll just take my chances. Maybe I'll get hit by a bus before lung cancer kills me. So why bother to quit smoking, or get daily exercise, or eat right?"
Replace "smoking " with "climate change," "lung cancer" with "drought, famine, floods, and war" and "quitting, exercise and eating right" with "developing renewable energy sources" and you have encapsulated the mindset of the climate change deniers.
Another coping mechanism is rationalizing that we'll just adapt. "People can just move. We'll find a way to stop if it does happen. Human ingenuity trumps all." They just don't seem to get that using ingenuity sooner rather than later would save a whole lot of trouble, money and lives.
Perhaps the most foolish rationalization possible is that "God won't let it happen. He promised." Yeah, and every football team that huddles in prayer before the big game wins, right?
Then there are the "we can't be the first" and "it's not all our fault" rationalizations. This argument goes: since China is emitting the most CO2 now, we don't have to do anything -- even though in 2009 we burned four times more fossil fuel per capita than China.
Then there's uncertainty: some climate change deniers like the Koch brothers are well-versed in science. They know that climate change predictions are difficult, and any number of things could cause the planet to cool if they happened. There is natural variation in climate, and maybe we'll luck out and it'll kick when we need it most. If a giant volcano blows up, the planet would be cooled down. If a sizable asteroid hit the planet, we'd have a nuclear winter. If solar output mysteriously drops, the temperature could plummet.
But doing nothing because such unpredictable -- and terribly destructive -- things might happen is the worst kind of wishful thinking. It's like speeding toward an intersection and closing your eyes when the light turns yellow.
The last refuge of these scoundrels is not patriotism, but money. "Even if everything you say is true, it'll cost too much to do anything about climate change." This is essentially what the few reputable climate scientists that the Koch brothers' claim as their own have said. They admit it's happening, but there's just too much political and economic inertia to do anything about it. "We'll just have to make the best of it."
The climate change deniers of today are like the smokers of the Sixties. They know what they're doing is bad, but can't kick the habit. But as the scientific evidence that smoking caused disease kept piling up, and more people got tired of breathing second-hand smoke, smoking started to be banned most everywhere: planes, restaurants, bars, even outside public buildings.
The problem is that climate change deniers can't smoke in the privacy of their own homes: their CO2 winds up in the same atmosphere that shapes the climate that we all live in.
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