Venture Brothers Update

Some good news for fans of the Venture Brothers:

We're currently finishing up the tenth script of the season

Ben Edlund is supposed to turn in the eleventh script of the season in this coming week

Ben Edlund is the creator of The Tick! one of my all-time favorite comics/shows/mental-breakdowns.

The color department kicked into gear about a month and a half ago and are blowing me away. They're currently working on the third episode...

ut-oh! 3rd episode??? I was hoping for some eps by Christmas! oh well, looks like the Spring.

For anyone who is new and doesn't know what I'm talking about, the Venture Brothers is the funniest show ever made. At least if you're an aging, 70's cartoon watching person of dry wit and a sense of the absurd.

Otherwise it's probably just ... strange.

Here is a test, read the following line out loud in your best villian voice:

"While you were castrating that priceless antiquity, I was feeding babies to hungry mutated puppies! Bwaaahahahahahahaha"

Did you laugh? If so, watch the show if not...

I just did this and have been asked to close the door to my office by my neighbor across the hall. She was not laughing.

She probably has a baboon's uterus.

A Confession

I'm embarassed to admit this, but I feel I have no choice.

Sigh.

This is hard to type.

ok, here goes.

I've been reading Arianna Huffington's blog.
Worse, I'm starting to enjoy it.

Oh, it started off innocently enough, just following the occasional link from Andrew Sullivan or occasionally from Kos. Sometimes interesting things would be written there, but I could never escape the feeling that Arianna was behind it all and I would get the guilty feeling like I had just bought something in a plain, brown wrapper like Playboy, Oui or the Village Voice.

Today I jumped over there just to see what was doing on. Arianna made a point about Bob Woodward I had been thinking for 10 years now and I realized with horror that we agree on a lot.

I am scared!

Anyway, back to Bob Woodward:

I found myself thinking about Woodward and his barrel-searching as I read Frank Rich's latest takedown of the administration's cover up of "wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe":

Each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless... The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House.

During this time, Woodward was writing two books on the administration -- Bush at War and Plan of Attack -- and enjoyed unparalleled access to many of those guiding the aforementioned P.R. operation, including head shills Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Andy Card.

So how come Woodward, supposedly the preeminent investigative reporter of our time, missed the biggest story of our time -- a story that was taking place right under his nose?
Some would say it's because he's carrying water for the Bushies. I disagree. I think it's because he's the dumb blonde of American journalism, so awed by his proximity to power that he buys whatever he's being sold.

Happy Birthday Geoff

The Boy turns 20 today. His mother calls him at the time of his birth every year, 6:13am and reminds him, in detail, about the 29 hours of labor she had.

I'm content merely to publish his email address on my blog. That would be gch23@drexel.edu
Write to him and say Happy Birthday, even if you don't know him well.

What happened at the MS clinic?

Thanks all for the notes. I guess going offline for a few days afterward left an information hole becuase I have received a lot of very generous notes the last few days. I wrote the following in response to one, once I got my head together. It covers the bases, and so I'm going to post it here. Again, thanks for your overwhelming support, I really do appreciate it.

What happened at the MS clinic? Below is a (very slight) paraphrase, but it reflects the conversation.

Short version (after the 90 minute exam):
Doc: While it's certainly possible you have MS, that's not my first impression. Also several signs argue against it.
Mark: like what?
Doc: You have no reflexes. Not diminished ones, just none. I can't raise a reflex at all, anywhere. It's weird.
Mark: It's that because of diabetes?
Doc: That's possible, but usually MS patients have exaggerated reflexes. The shorts in the spine cause hypersensitivty. You're the opposite, even with diabetes. Also, you NCV are not normal. Not nearly.
Mark: The Nerve conduction speeds? They told be 30 m/s was normal, if just barely.
Doc: No. 50 is normal. 30 is clearly compromised. It's also consistent with why you can't walk. The peripheral nerves are clearly damaged.
Mark: So it's not MS?
Doc: I didn't say that. It's defiantly a movement disorder though. We need another round of MRIs. BTW, your Wilson's hypothesis was clever. We should run the test. Let me check you for the Kayser-Fleischer ring. . Nope, but that's not conclusive.
Mark: Wait, I thought they ran that already.
Doc: No, but they did note you requested it. As I said, that was clever.
Mark: Thanks. I make a living being clever. What about Huntington's.
Doc: Also clever. And something we have to talk about.
Mark: Why?
Doc: I don't do Huntington's tests. I'm going to send you over to University of Washington for that. Dr. Ramii specializes in movement disorders and HD. He can handle it, but it will take several appointments and we won't get results until February.
Mark: I thought it was just as blood test. Is it as painful as the spinal tap?
Doc: No, it's a blood test. very simple. It's just that we handle them very sensitively. You'll need consoling no matter how it comes out.
Mark: why? Can't you just run it?
Doc: No.
Mark: Why not?
Doc: ... Because there is a significant suicide risk. Almost 6% of patients commit suicide within a year of getting a diagnosis.
Mark: Really???
Doc: Yes. Which reminds me. I'm also going to sign you up for a set of neuropsych evals.
Mark: I am NOT suicidal.
Doc: No, but you are having trouble remembering faces and names, get confused, have trouble concentrating, right?
Mark: Yes.
Doc: Neuropsych will figure out if it's real or if you're just getting old
Mark: or both!

Mark: So, looks like February until all this is done. What should I do in the meantime.
Doc: No meds until we know. I suggest a cane for now to help with your balance. Are you sure it's a balance problem and not just weakness?
Mark: It feels like I'm going to fall over, which seems like balance to me.
Doc:ok. Then yes, February.

Very short version:
February.

One quick Postscript, the doctor called me about an hour after I left his office:
Doc: I looked up Protonix in the PDR. You said you were taking that to supress the chocking fits right?
Mark: Yes. And it works! I'm not all that concer...
Doc: Ok. It turns out Protonix supresses reflexes.
Mark: oh!
Doc: We should run them again in 2 weeks once that stuff washes out of your system.
Mark: But I'll start choking again in a few days if I go off it. I've run the experiment accidently once or twice while traveling.
Doc: I'm going to prescribe Zanex. It should give the same effect but without neurological side effects.
Mark: cool!

Things That Are Not Physics

I was thrown off by the address. OTOH it's still, an interesting fairy tail.

The Book of Mormon makes the bold statement that Jesus Christ, shortly following His resurrection, visited people in the New World and invited them to "feel the prints of the nails in my hands and in my feet, that ye may know that I am...the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. ... Ye are they of whom I said: Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice..." (3 Nephi 11:14, 15:21). The Bible states that Jesus "showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days" and that this witness of Christ would be "unto the uttermost part of the earth." (Acts 1:3-8) and that Jesus would indeed visit "other sheep" (John 10:16).

Okay, well maybe that's not his strong suit. Maybe it's Physics. Let's see.

Look, instructions on how to make a solar power mirror!

At 40 degrees latitude on a clear afternoon, water can boil in 1.5 hours. Also you can point the solar funnel towards the stars on a cloudless night to freeze your pot overnight!

"point the solar funnel toward the stars ... to freeze your pot..."

while I *think* he means the funnel to act as a radiator (but it still wouldn't get any colder than the surrounding air with or without the funnel) ... it's not clear from the text ... well, let's just say "it's not clear from the text"

ooooookaaay. Maybe physics isn't his strongest suit either...

Update: I don't know how I missed this. It sort of, kinda, nearly toches on physics.
It certainly doesn't touch on engineering.

Snow!

The fourth horseman of the Seattle Apocalypse is loose. Snow! The weather forecasters say we might actually get 2 or more inches.

Now, being from New England and Detroit, 2 inches isn't even an annoyance, it's what happens when the wind blows. Here though, schools will close, roads will lock up, people will horde food, water and sensible woolen vests. Given that it will snow tonight, I am guessing almost no one shows up on campus tomorrow.

This, believe it or not, makes sense.

It makes sense because, and I mean no disrespect, these people do not know how to drive in the snow. Rain? Oh they have that down cold. Snow? No. They are still in the lowest snow-driving category along with Hawaiians, Arizonians, Haitians, Puerto Ricans and Texans. ... Well... maybe not Texans. They still have trouble with cold rain. However, Seattle folk have not developed snow driving skills through practice and so they simply make the basic mistakes no Midwesterner would make after the age of 16. Generally, they drive one of two ways. Most of them act as though snow was an odd form of rain (which is somewhat true) and don't change at all. The result? Extremely polite driving behavior at 75mph on a frictionless surface. They spin, and wave to their neighbors. They skid, and wave to let you cut in. They flip off to the side of the road but use turn signals. And, very occasionally, they slide down Pike Street into the bay at alarming velocity, worried that they’ve cut off a pedestrian.

For example, today there was NO SNOW, but a little bit of ice. Result? The 520 bridge is closed due to crashes, the 90 Bridge is now a 3 hour drive (or bay tour, take your pick). These are not well developed skilz.

But those are the A students. The real D- folks take another approach entirely. They drive on snow as though it were a rain of broken glass or perhaps rare, endangered spotted-owl eggs. They drive S L O W L Y. As they listen to the sound their tires make, a worried sweat breaks out on their foreheads. Crunch! Crunch! Every mph over 3 means more dead baby owls. And, if their wheels spin, you can actually see the panic on their faces as they realize they are driving TOO FAST!

"Jesus Christ Harry! Slow the fuck down! You're spinning the wheels!"
"I'm only doing 2mph! What should I put it in reverse?"
" ... .... Yes!"

Why the problems? Because they don't salt the roads (bad for the roads and the spotted-owl eggs) and they don't really plow. There is no budget for it. I was here once during a storm in late February. The town of Kirkland, having exhausted it's entire snow removal budget on new ice trays for the Mayor's office fridge, instead of plowing chose to, get this, "drive garbage trucks around town to compact the snow. For better traction!" I'm not making that up. They succeeded in turning almost every major road into an ice rink, with resulting hilarity! No fewer than 3 garbage trucks had to be towed out of yards (and one swimming pool) after the "compacted snow" or as we used to call it on the New England Ski trails, "packed powder", or more simply "death ice", caused major accidents all over town.

It's going to snow tomorrow and I am going to "work from home". No way I’m getting on the road with these folks.

Weeeeeeee! Snow Day!

Working on New Art

I did manage to get a little art started this weekend, although nothing far enough along to post drafts. Maybe another week. The piece is a still life that contains another image (also of my creation), so it's a picture in a picture thing.

The inspiration for this is the unparalleled Tomasz Rut.

Crash!

My Alpha drive crashed this weekend. Alpha was the first 233Gig USB 2.0 drive I got for the home server and is the oldest with, of course, most of the most interesting files.

I got it repaired, but lost about 20% of the file structure, including all my downloads of the Dave Chappelle show. Not good. So I went out and bought a new Maxtor 300Gig drive and backed up all the remaining files to it. Welcome drive Delta!

Alpha has been reformatted and put back into service, albiet only as backup storage and not online at all times.

Monorail

I was walking down 5th Ave in Seattle this weekend when something I thought pretty cool happened. As I was walking into the city center, the monorail train passed overhead. 'I live in a city where a monorail is commonplace, cool'. The cherry on the sundae occured when I looked at the ads on the side, "Windows Cluster Server". Not only was the monorail commonplace, but it was advertising my company. Outstanding! Very 20th century Sci-Fi.

Then, later in the day, the 21st century stepped in.

Quiet

Sorry for the gap in blogging. It's been kind of quiet around here. Jim has been in Seattle the last few days and, well, things did not go as well as I had hoped on Wednesday with the MS clinic (more later), so I have taken a few days off from the world.

I should be back with some items over the weekend.

Sony Rootkit

A really outstanding walkthrough of the Sony Rootkit story by Mark Russinovick, the analyst who discovered it. Added bonus; he links to all the tools.

The DRM reference made me recall having purchased a CD recently that can only be played using the media player that ships on the CD itself and that limits you to at most 3 copies. I scrounged through my CD’s and found it, Sony BMG’s Get Right with the Man (the name is ironic under the circumstances) CD by the Van Zant brothers.

Excellent quote from Sony President Thomas Hesse

Nanotech Update

The Chinese are *way* ahead of us in nanobiotechnology.

Also, there is this news out of New Zealand

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets

An Empirical Study

I *KNEW* it!

When tin-foil hats are outlawed, only outlaws will have tin-foil hats.

UPDATE: What kind of scientist would I be if I didn't publish the rebuttle?

Printing Your Resume At Work

Think no one can track your paper documents?

Think again.

http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

Decypher Dog

Muppet Babies meet the National Security Agency as seen by the marketing department.

I wish I could make this shit up.

On The Way Up

MSFT stock has been lanquishing at $24.50 +/- $1 for months and has been a drag on my portfolio. Last week I finally had enough and set an auto-sell order if it got to $27. It did last week. On it's way to $29+

Crap.

Some Physics I Don't Quite Get

From the APOD:

Alternatively, surface particles may become electrically charged by the Sun, levitate in the microgravity field, and move to fill in craters.

I understand the Poynting-Robertson effect (applied here to asteroid dust instead of free particles but it's the relavent physics), and the whole suspended dust thing. The two-part question I don't know the answer to is a) if the gravity is that weak, why don't the particles just fly off all together and b) why don't we see this anywhere else?

It's a mystery.

Penn Jillette

I heard Penn on NPR's "This I Believe" this morning and thought he did a fantastic job expressing my view on religion. When I got in, I was going to post a link.

Ironically, I got some email this morning from Tara, linking me to the same piece. :) 20 years later and I am still the same.

Penn talks about an important part of atheism that a lot of sober, serious religious minded folk neglect, the basis for making moral choices. A lot of arguments I have had start with the naive view that "without god, men would all do evil", sort of the reverse of the Marxist-Leninist assumption. I've never bought into either extreme. If folks want to do bad, religion will give them an excuse to do what they want (like flying planes into buildings), similar to doing good (like running into a burning building to save folks). People's gods look an awful lot like themselves. My point is, dispense with the middleman and be more honest about morals. Folks will do what they think is right, god or no god.

Penn does a good job summarizing the economics of atheism:

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. [...] So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

It's a good article and, while there is some moralizing and making fun of the other side, there is no more of it here than I've received in a decent catholic mass. It's just directed toward the folks who aren't used to being mocked.

Supporting the Troops

I don't think this is what people have in mind exactly:

Here's how it works: non-military members sign up to adopt a soldier on Rush's website, while current military members sign up to be adopted. Once an adopter and an adoptee are matched up, the adopted soldier receives a free subscription to "The Limbaugh Letter" and to the premium content on Rush's website.

Fabulous! And all at the low, low cost of $50, which goes directly into Rush's pocket.

Oh, I'm sorry - you didn't think he was doing this out of charity did you? Nope, despite the fact that Rush's site claims to be offering "complimentary RUSH 24/7 subscriptions," if you want to be able to say you've adopted a soldier through Rush's program then you have to cough up the cash. Because someone's got to pay for those "complimentary subscriptions," and it sure as hell ain't gonna be Limbaugh.

(via)

Typical.

Actually, It's All in the Wrist

Penny Arcade on wednesday was very good.

Richard Scarry's Worst Fucking Acid Trip Ever

From Something Awful.

That said, it's a Really GOOD Tack!

Ill Advised Products from the 99 cent store.

Now THIS is a Grudge!

The goons at Something Awful have had a long running feud with Eric Bauman, owner of eBaumsWorld.com. I've got a membership at SA, but was largely unaware of the feud until recently when Geoff found this parody of Eric’s (alleged) content-stealing ways.

2 things. 1) It's damn catchy (I might use the bit about male prostitutes someday in an argument and 2) it's a great use of parody.

Everyone, quick! Swap seats!

An interesting justaposition of Condi and Hillary in Isreal this week, especially in the visuals.

It's terrifying to me that either of those two has even a remote shot at being president. I can't stand either one.

Slowly Getting Back Up to Speed

I've received a number of emails and phone calls this week asking how I am doing. Thanks all, I'm doing fine. After I got out of the hospital on Thursday, the movers came nad packed up the apartment on Friday. I spent the weekend in Maine, and now I'm going stop-to-stop on my way back to Redmond. I managed to spend a good chunk of yesterday with Geoff which was also overdue.

I should be back to Seattle tomorrow and probably back to my cranky, skeptical self again shortly after that. It's been a busy couple of months.

In Astronomy News

Lori Allen, one of the 6 members of my graduate class as UMass, made the NYT Science section this week with images from her telescope, Spitzer.

The astronomers, led by Lori E. Allen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, say the towering mountains of the new image probably represent the densest, most fecund remnants of a larger, cloud. It is being eroded by radiation and winds of particles from a ferociously bright star just out of the top of the picture.

Nestled within the dusty pillars are hundreds of embryonic stars. But Spitzer's detectors are designed to see infrared, or "heat," radiation right through the dust, allowing astronomers to study the cloaked stars, which Dr. Allen described as "offspring" of the big star.

"The Sun could have formed in such a cluster, since many stars form in clusters," Dr. Allen said in an e-mail message, explaining that pressure created by the star could compress gas in the cloud, bringing about the formation of new stars.

Looking all... well... Mature...

notice I said Mature instead of the word I was really thinking...

I suppose I'll have to eventually stop calling him "the boy"

He is, Literally, THE Man

unless he is a woman.
Copied verbatim from a diner placemat I received at Little Peter's Seafood Restaurant in Enfield Maine:

Howland was incorporated in 1826, and was named after Mayflower passenger John Howland. It's population is 1,362 is 47.2% male and 52.8% female. 98.1% are white, 1% two or more races and 0.9% American Indian. The median resident age is 39.8 years. Median household income is $29,213. Howland's elevation above sea level is 170 feet.

Enfield was incorporated in 1835. 1,616 people call Enfield home. 98.76% of them are white, 0.06% African American, 0.93% two or more races and 0.19% American Indian. The median age is 38 years. Median household income is $36,458

So, during my BLT I recognized that 1616 * 0.0006 was about... 1. !

My Best Friend from Junior High...

... writes me the best note I have recieved in months. Tara and I were inseperable friends at the Charles E Brake Junior High in Taylor Michigan 28 years ago. Tara introduced me to Steve Martin, Saturday Night Live and a host of other life-shaping things. I moved to PA in 1978 and haven't really heard from here since about 1980.

Yesterday, I receved this note on my AOL account:

Dear Mr. Horvath,
Little did I know that my search for "Evil Genius" on Google this morning would lead me to you. Again.

How I Got My Diagnosis

It's last Wednesday. I have been sitting in the epilepsy ward of the Lahey Clinic. A couple dozen multicolored wires have been super glued to my head, I am being monitored and video taped 24/7 and have a long tether which connects the probes to the wall. My laptop and cell phone have been taken away. Apparently use of the latter two objects cause the EEG probes to read them as seizures. After the first time the crash cart arrived in my room and found me reading Kos, they took them away from me.

They are used to patients who have large dramatic seizures, are old or cannot take care of themselves. They have twice threatened me with restraints if I get up and go to the bathroom on my own. They are trying to take charge of my insulin regime and had, at that point, managed to make a has of it. I threatened to walk out and sue of they didn't let me do my insulin myself. They relented and I give myself all my injections (even apart from insulin). The staff and I have a fragile détente. AFAIK there has been no progress on my diagnosis except to rule out metal poisoning.

I get a call on my plastic, wired room phone which has so far, only range once:
Me: hello?
MS Person: Hi this is Mrs. X from MS Benefits! We just got your diagnosis and wanted to let you know that I'll be your case worker. I work for Premera and will help you steer through all the paperwork, appointments and therapy. I need to get some information from you is that okay?
Me: Well, I'm in the hospital, and I don't have anything else to do ...
MSP: Great. You're Mark Horvath.
Me: Yes.
MSP: You're currently in the Lahey Clinic Room 7W30?
Me: Yes
MSP: You're employee Number is XXXXXX. Your Birthday is 8/2/64?
Me: Yes.
[After more info exchange]
MSP: Terrific, thanks Mark. Now I'd like to get you set up with a doctor here who specializes in your condition, unless you have someone you're already seeing.
Me: No. No one in Seattle. What do you have down as my diagnosis?
MSP: Oh, Multiple Sclerosis. Why?
Me: ... oh. They hadn't told me that.
MSP: (Oh SHIT Silence) ..... .... ....
Me: So who would you recommend I see out there?
MSP: I'm sorry, I thought they told you. I'm not supposed to give diagnosis to patients.
Me: No problem, I'm seeing the doctors this afternoon anyway. Are there specialists in Seattle.
MSP: oh Yes! Overlake has a whole facility. Would you like me to schedule you an appointment with the head of neurology?
Me: yes please....

and so, in violation of HIPAA, GLB and a variety of other laws, MS Benefits and their cost-controlling eager-beaverism gave me my diagnosis of MS. I talked to my doctors later and went through a bunch of things with them. MS is their current working hypothesis, although after reviewing the tapes they *strongly* recommended I go get a test for Huntington's. They wouldn't run it there because, by federal law, there needs to be "genetic counseling" with a Huntington's test and, since I was moving to Seattle, they felt they could not provide this. They did give me some print outs of where I could get this done and re-emphasized that I should do this sooner rather than later, "just in case".

and there it is.

I doubt the Huntington's hypothesis just because AFAIK, my father doesn't have it. This assumes my father is actually my biological father which I have not has cause to doubt until this week.

OTOH, it would explain a few things....

Anyway, that's the story. All other things being equal, I have MS, just like my sister.

Possible Downtime

I'm off to Lahey this morning. While it's possible they have a wireless connection I can ride, I'm not counting on it. Updates, in theory Friday.

Bremsstrahlung

I bought City of Heros this weekend (possibly for use at Lahey if there is an internet connection there, although my hopes are low) and it was fantastic. This is the first on-line RPG I've ever played and it was not as intimidating as I thought it would be. I figured everyone would be better at everything than me (kind of like gym class), but there were lots of low level folks to help me along and plenty of things to do on my own. Once or twice though I got stuck in an area of the city where I was so overmatched by level 20 street thugs it took me several lives to get out.

I put together a "science hero" with broad based electrical powers and good all over stats (a blaster), complete with blue spandex tights. I'm sure everyone else recognized it as a first avatar, but it wasn't too bad. I decided to name him Bremsstrahlung after a type of astrophysical radiation common in the interstellar medium. Much to my total surprise, it was taken! I was totally floored! It was like naming your baby Chlamydia and finding out that someone else took it. I ended up naming him AXAF after the satellite of the same name, however, I have started thinking about some names:

Captain Physics
Blue Screen of Death
Colonel Panic
Major Trouble
Chlamydia the Hilarious Clown

I am happily taking suggestions (with suggestions for powers)

Guantanamo Bay Diet

Posted without comment:

It hasn't received much coverage in the mainstream media - at least not in America anyway - but it's currently reckoned that about 200 of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay are taking part in a hunger strike which is eliciting concern from the International Red Cross.
Why are they doing this? Because they want to be treated in a manner consistent with the Geneva Conventions. Best of luck with that one.

Of course the military have put their own spin on the situation, calling the hunger strike a "voluntary fast," with a mere 26 participants. 21 of those participants have apparently been hospitalized for "assisted feedings" via a tube placed up the nose and down the throat. According to The Nation:

...someone committed to self-starvation could easily remove such a tube, if he had any freedom of movement. So we can surmise that there is a line of twenty-one hospital beds, each with a prisoner held tight in four-point restraints. His head must be strapped down, immobile, and forcible sedation seems probable. Hardly the image evoked by the term "assisted feeding."

Thank goodness Donald Rumsfeld is here to explain the situation more clearly. Last week he told reporters, "There are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point. And then they rotate and other people do that."

So let me get this straight... down at Six Flags Guantanamo Bay the inmates have "never been treated better;" in fact we're feeding them so much honey-glazed chicken and lemon-baked fish that every so often they decide to go on a diet!

George Orwell must be vomiting in his grave.

2 Tons

"Books: 4000+ lbs"

Item from the inventory of Grabel movers on our apartment.
Holy Shit!

I would never have guessed we had that many books. OTOH, all the closets are full, every corner is piled with them etc. We have pieces of furniture which are effectively 90% book by weight. If you've never been inside the apartment, this is the reason why. It's usually a mess with books all over the place. But two tons?? I would never have guessed that.

The First Lady's Possessions

Well, she looks possessed to ME.

Wonkette is hilarious today. (Especially the bit about Scott)

A Complex Quote

I'm not sure what to make of this quote from Bill Frist:

''It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do. And I was totally schizoid about the entire matter. By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy.''
--From Bill Frist's 1989 memoir concerning his capturing, killing and dissecting of cats

I'm not sure of the context of "capturing, killing and dissecting of cats". If he means he caught them himself and dissected them, it seems a little weird. I don't know that much about med school, so if anyone has any idea, I'd appreciate enlightenment.

He certainly seems to have a conflicted tone here, arrogant, ambitious and yet uncomfortable about his moral limits. And, to his credit, self-aware enough to know he's uncomfortable. In general I am slightly more reassured by this than if he had no qualms about (I'm presuming) hunting and killing cats. OTOH, he clearly went past some outer moral lighthouse on this and kept going. Maybe that's a strength, maybe it's sociopathic ambition, I can't tell.

It's an interesting quote though, even if I can't quite parse it.

There is more, even more amaturish psychobable here. I think the writer read too much into it.

A Risk I Am Willing to Take

I had a dream as a kid where I died in the Middle East in my 40's. It was very strong and for a long time (until the date in question finally passed) I superstitiously gave it a wide berth.

Geoff brings this into the conversation below:

Toast171: You know, in the dream where I get shot coming off the plane in the middle east, you are standing next to me.
Toast171: Maybe you do come with me after all
Thaurloteion: see? so i have to come
Thaurloteion: otherwise it disrupts the timeline
Toast171: and it would cause a cascade of quantum collapse across all the realities. You are a nexus.
Toast171: {I heard that on Dr. Who}
Thaurloteion: well see then i have to go
Toast171: actually, according to temporal physics, you already went.
Toast171: You go because you always go
Toast171: nothing I decide can change it
Thaurloteion: so book me a ticket
Toast171: oh, you have to pay for it yourself
Toast171: but you do, because you always do
Toast171: in a sense, you already paid for it
Thaurloteion: how do you know i dont always have my ticket purchased for me?
Toast171: it's a possible disruption to the fabric of all reality I am willing to risk

Thaurloteion: but think of all those alternate realities you could wipe out
Toast171: Every decision wipes out alternate realities.
Toast171: Chicken or Fish? Poof! Millions of worlds gone
Toast171: Coke or Pepsi
Toast171: smooth or ribbed
Toast171: it's all the same

I Blog, You Decide

I have an opportunity to perhaps go to Iraq and help them set up some infrastrucutre for a Central Bank. Working with third world countries and getting them into the payments area has become an accidental speciality at MSFT and we are considering going in and setting up a good portion of the central systems.

I made the mistake of mentioning this to Geoff.

Thaurloteion: when are you supposed to go to iraq?
Toast171: dunno
Thaurloteion: where in iraq are you supposed to go?
Toast171: Baghdad, in theory
Thaurloteion: can i come too?
Toast171: I'm thinking... no
Thaurloteion: you said next time you got a security detail i could come
Toast171: ...
Toast171: I didn't mean go "into a war zone"
Thaurloteion: I don’t eat much and I don’t know right from wrong
Toast171: neither of those things are true
Toast171: I am not taking you to Iraq
Thaurloteion: maybe it'll scare me away from thinking about enlisting
Toast171: like scared straight?
Thaurloteion: yes
Toast171: ... but with bullets instead of anal rape
Thaurloteion: right
Toast171: No!
Thaurloteion: please?
Toast171: I don't think this is a "please" situation
Thaurloteion: what kind of situation is it?
Toast171: a Kevlar pajamas kind
Thaurloteion: that wouldn’t be an issue if you would have bought me that kevlar i wanted in high school
Toast171: The past is full of regrets for all of us
Thaurloteion: travel abroad is always a plus on a resume
Thaurloteion: especially a resume for the letter soups
Toast171: so is "being alive"
Thaurloteion: that’s what the security detail is for
Thaurloteion: plus itd be a good networking opportunity
Thaurloteion: i could talk with the civilian contractors and see who's hiring and such
Toast171: networking with Al Queda?
Thaurloteion: no, places like kbr
Thaurloteion: it'd be a nice thing to do
Toast171: How about if I blog this and let the responses decide?
Thaurloteion: ok
Thaurloteion: if there’s one thing we republicans are good at, its rigging elections

Comment below please

What I Do for a Living

I often get asked, especially by friends I don’t see very often, what I do for a living. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to describe and, often, my job title doesn’t help much or is only tangentially related. Generally speaking, I solve various kinds of problems. Sometimes they are problems in logistics, or software testing, or design and engineering. Occasionally they are management or personnel problems and every once in a great while, it’s a problem like funding or patents. Once or twice in my career, I’ve been asked to work on a team which tries to solve something big, sometimes really big, and I enjoy these jobs the most.

Often, but certainly not always (or even the majority of time), my solutions work. Most times they don’t work completely and sometimes they totally fail. Generally though, the sum value of all the working bits outweighs the non-working bits and folks end up giving me more problems to solve. When I was younger, I would do this in ways which would often frustrate and annoy my friends because, while everyone would agree the solution worked, no one quite understood how I’d come up with it. [One that comes to mind was solving a complicated problem involving inductive transformers by looking at the problem as a magnetic circuit and solving it in 3 lines. Knezek actually whaled on me with a copy of Jackson for about 5 minutes until I hit her back. To this day *I* am considered the bully there for some reason!] These days, since I am being paid and the solutions often have some value, no one really cares much how I did it.
This is good, because often, I don’t know either.

Once in a very great while, usually only once or twice in one of my 5 year company careers, I do something really cool. At CertCo I got to do that twice, once with the Identrus architecture and once again with the NTBTO. At HKS I invented an automated QA system that used an AI. At Kurzweil… well, nothing that great actually. Some UI stuff, some organizational stuff, but nothing “oh!” kind of clever. I never work on these alone, so I would never claim sole credit, but they are cool collaborative efforts in which I’ve seen an idea of mine come to life.

I’ve gotten my first opportunity to do one of these at Microsoft. In this case, it’s the future of banking. The challenge; only given technology you have accessible today, design a banking/trade floor system that will last for 30 years. Burroughs did this in the late 60s, early 70’s, IBM did it in the mid-70’s, as did Tandum and a few others. But all those systems are old now and, despite the fact that I don’t believe in a singularity per se, technology really is changing very fast, Moore’s law is still approximately correct and standards are evolving at a pace which calls into question the use of the word. The old systems are dying quickly and there is a real problem with replacement. Some would say “don’t bother, it’s changing too fast. Design it for 5 to 7 years.” Which would be a fair answer to another technologist, but bankers just won’t accept it. Y2K was a big shock to them and many have not gotten over it or really understand why it happened. Bankers think in 30 year timeslots and MSFT has gone in, unsuccessfully with the 5-7 year line for 20 years now and it simply doesn’t fly.

Kenny McBride, the head of MSFT Capital Markets along with Warren Lewis and David Vander in Banking, and I have been cranking on this problem for about a year now. The first cut of this is ready for public consumption, at least at the Vision/prototype level. We’ve put together 5 technical architectures in Payments, Trade Order Management, Insurance, Compliance and Channel Renewal, all based on existing technology, pieces of which are in play at different banks and Financial Service Institutions all over the planet. I’ve been test marketing the idea now for a few months and showing parts of it to various audiences, all of whom have given valuable feedback. This package was launched this week at the event with the PSI Banker’s School and Microsoft’s ISU 2005 and it seems to have gotten a good reception.

Our Industry and Innovation group (i.e. the marketing group), sat down with Warren, David and myself and asked us a bunch of questions about what this will look like, then put together the following. This is not a technical presentation, but one for getting the banking community to take a look at the underlying architectures and getting them to think about what is possible. Think of this as the commercial which gets them into the showroom where I can talk to them about the engine, gas mileage etc. Since it’s been launched, I think I’m allowed to show it.

It’s here although, somewhat ironically, you’ll need flash to run it. Don’t ask me, I think our whole marketing department runs on Quark Express or some crazy crap like that. Also, it's large. Very Large, 50M

[Update: some security systems won't let you run the demo. I've posted a zip with everything you need ZIPFILE. Download and run it from that. Apologies}

Everything in it is possible to put into production today. All the really hard bits; straight through processing, reference data lookup, micropayments, TARGET 2, STEP2, Basel, etc. are all covered in the technical architecture, which is under NDA. I can say most of the solutions are based on variations of an Enterprise Service Bus architecture, and all of them are compatible with existing systems, legacy systems, unix etc. Mobility is a key technology and, using the .NET framework, the application code is largely independent of the end rendering device, i.e. I can write a smart client app for the desktop and it will work with little or no modification on a mobile platform.

It’s a cool thing and one of the few times I have something tangible I can show a general audience about what I do.

The Geoff Horvath Award

Appearently it's real. There's even a photo of Geoff Horvath.

a hat tip to Becky, who found this

The Heart of the Problem with Traditional Marriage

Dan Savage gets the prototypical letter on "tired marriage syndrome"

Various Conversations with Geoff

He's 20 now, I have to stop calling him "the boy"

Thaurloteion: hows banker college?
Toast171: good! My bank placed 4th overall. I made a lot of money, but lost some accounts
Thaurloteion: did they give you surprises
Thaurloteion: like a robbery
Thaurloteion: robberies drive away accounts
Toast171: It was a $100,000,000,000 bank in 15 states. Robbery is built into the model.
Thaurloteion: oh, good then
Thaurloteion: if you were a school you could make a banner like the one at the school near work
Thaurloteion: it says the school name
Thaurloteion: and what appears to be a motto or something motivational
Thaurloteion: it says "We made adequate yearly progress in 2004"
Toast171: Our bank, with $100 billion in assets was called "The Penny Bank"
Toast171: because we had a lot of pennies
Thaurloteion: one time i hit someone with a sock full of pennies
Thaurloteion: he said it hurt
Thaurloteion: why does your bank hurt people?
Toast171: To teach people painful lessons about saving money

...

Thaurloteion: did the doctors ever shine a light in your eye to look for a ring of copper?
Thaurloteion: see i saw this on a tv show
Toast171: not my eye, no.

Thaurloteion: there was this crazy lady, and they thought she had schizophrenia
Thaurloteion: but she wasnt crazy she just had some kind of disease that puts copper in your eye
Toast171: Wilson's Disease. It's very rare.
Thaurloteion: probably
Toast171: There is a chance I have that
Thaurloteion: oh
Thaurloteion: thats bad
Toast171: No, it's good. It's curable
Thaurloteion: but it can be fatal
Toast171: the alternative is also fatal and less curable
Thaurloteion: oh, that is also bad
Toast171: I agree. It would also be bad news for my decendants
Thaurloteion: its genetic isnt it?
Toast171: yes, and dominant
Thaurloteion: thats bad for me. but why wouldnt it have shown up prior to now?
Toast171: It usually shows up at 40
Thaurloteion: oh
Toast171: but there is a genetic test for it, so you'd know now and 20 years to worry about it
Thaurloteion: so instead of a car for my midlife crisis, i'm going to get a fatal disease
Thaurloteion: great...
Toast171: no, they don't know that I have that. I'm still hoping for copper.
Thaurloteion: hey! i could play the sympathy card
Thaurloteion: it'd get mad wimmens
Toast171: besides, that means you're at mid-life now, so you'd get a cool car
Toast171: mad wimmins... hahahahhahahahahaha
Toast171: If you do, don't mention the insanity thing right away.
Toast171: wait until your third date
Thaurloteion: see thats the thing with having mad wimmens, its all one night stands and such

Alito Speculation

From Volokh from Bloomberg

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito Jr., meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, told one senator that the U.S. Constitution guarantees a right to privacy and won praise from Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said Alito told him in their meeting that he recognized a right to privacy, the principle that underlies the Supreme Court's abortion rights rulings. "I think he believes in that fundamental right," Durbin told reporters in Washington

I'm guessing he makes it, short of another conservative backlash, a nanny problem, or photos of him eating a baby.

Banking School

I'm away this week, taking a course on how to run a bank. It's been more fun than it sounds so far, made more palatable by tools like the bank simulator. The first part of the day is spent on the blocking and tackling parts of banking, retail, commercial, operations, asset and liability management etc. In the afternoon we work in teams, are given a bank told to build a three year plan. The team is 4 or 5 people (one/two for retail/commercial, one for ops and one for asset management plus a CEO on some teams) and we are given a wide variety of knobs to turn, everything from ATM fees and locations to variable interest rate loans, interbank loans, overnight Fed loans etc. Each team is given the same bank to start, a little time on the simulator and then, at the end of the day, each team puts in a profile and the system runs them against each other along with some economic information. In the morning, we find out what we did right/wrong and what our status is among the other players.

There are about 100-120 folks in the class, divided into 4 regions of 7 banks each. Each team starts with the same bank and with the same economic info (e.g. prime is 800 bp but will goto to 775 at the end the of year one etc.) and with the FULL books and numbers for the bank. It would take the better part of a week to carefully parse the information, think it through and develop a strategy. We have 90 minutes. :)

Some observations:

Lots of folks cut all their mid and mass market programs and "focused" of high net worth. Of the 10-12 teams I talked to afterwards, all but one other took this strategy. Being a contrarian at heart, and remembering the ING think tank last month, I chose the other way and somewhat convinced the team to go along. We'll see today, but I suspect that there will be big fight for a handful of individuals and my Wall-mart, cheap and easy strategy will work (or I will have busted the bank, we'll see).

Most people were very conservative. They took this seriously and made no huge changes. We didn't either.

There was a trend in the HNWI data that, oddly, many of the HNWI strategy folks missed. HNW had a problem with non-performing loans, more so than mass market. This was surprising and we checked the data 4 or 5 times. We fixed this by raising minimum credit scores to 700 from 650 and then pouring some marketing money into it. Everyone else I talked to lowered this number. The way the sim works (I think), they will get a short term bump today, but then get hit hard on NPL tomorrow. We'll see.

No one took the "shoot the moon" strategy, i.e. no one liquidated all their branches and went totally online. Branches are a huge cost and the model would allow you to save huge by getting rid of them, but no one I talked to did. I hope today we find someone who did, I'd like to see how this pans out.

That's it. I'll update tomorrow, but the SimBank think is really a lot of fun and I'm learning shitloads about banking.

Brain Worms

Speaking of which, I am going into Lahey next Monday for about a week after which, hopefully, we'll have a final resolution for the brain worms thing. They're re-running everything from scratch and can compare it to the baselines last year.

Lots of problems are better (walking, swallowing) a few things are not as hot (I make faces now at random, I'm getting twitchier and, curiously for me, I'm getting a little emotional).

My working hypothesis is still some kind of metal poisoning, but I'll be relieved to get this done with and back to normal.

Moving Day

We had our pre-move walkthrough last week. This is where the movers, in this case Grabel, comes through the house, estimates the load, looks for breakables etc. I was traveling that day, so Jim did the tour and confirmed with them that we wanted pickup on the 31st. We spent last weekend packing and getting things in order. On the way back from dinner I noticed the moving permit signs were not up for the following morning. Not good.

Sure enough, the next day, no movers arrived.

I finally got a hold of them around noon. Despite having told them 3 times, they didn't record when we were scheduled for pick up. "Oh we can do it later in the week.", said my breezily unaccountable rep. That's not good for me as I'll be traveling and I'm in Lahey most of next week. ugh.

While being a Problem, it's not quite yet a ClusterFuck.

Also from FSM

I can't get my head around this quote:

"[Evolution] is not a fact . . . We're dealing with censorship here. If we only taught Shakespeare in English class, that wouldn't be fair."-- Senator Chris Buttars

So we should teach Shakespeare in ... gym?

Pirates!

The FSM knows global warming:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

The propsed explaination drew this response:

"It is a serious offense to mock God.",Mrs. Kathy Martin, District 6, Kansas State Board of Education

Technically, they are mocking you Mrs. Martin.


There is also this shameless bit of self-promotion:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONVERT TO FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTERISM
Flimsy moral standards.
Every friday is a relgious holiday. If your work/school objects to that, demand your religious beliefs are respected and threaten to call the ACLU.
Our heaven is WAY better. We've got a Stripper Factory AND a Beer Volcano.

Futurama pi-K

The mathematics of Futurama.

and, of course, the Simpsons.

2. Lisa: Dad, as intelligence goes up, happiness often goes down. In fact, I made a graph! [She holds up a decreasing, concave upward graph on axes marked “intelligence” and “happiness”] Lisa: [sadly] I make a lot of graphs.

250,000 superballs in San Francisco

via Boing Boing.

here

Geoff and I once released a dozen superballs into a parking strucuture in Altoona. This is exactly 20,833.3333 times better.

The Geometry of Pundits

...is not orthonormal. From the NYT today on the atmosphere in the White House

"People who tell you that having a scandal doesn't affect them have one, never been through it; two, are lying; or three, are idiots," Mr. Sosnik said.

Climate Change News

Sometime back Travis had linked to the following as a catch-all explanation for why one should not believe in climate change data as relates to the Greenhouse Effect. All the recorded temperature change could be explained by variations in the solar cycle. I had a little free time today and thought I'd take a look at the paper. The graph above summerizes their findings.

It's quite a compelling chart.

It's also been completely refuted. While the authors of the refutation don't make a political judgment, they do show that the only arithmetic errors Friis-Christensen and Lassen make support their hypothesis and handle the rest correctly.

The revised chart without the errors fails to support their idea in any way.

Alastair G. W. Cameron, 80, Theorist on Creation of Moon, Dies

From the NYT:

Dr. Cameron's famous work, known as the giant impact theory, holds that a planet roughly the size of Mars struck Earth, sending fragments of Earth's mantle spinning into the atmosphere. The ring of space debris that resulted may have ultimately come together to form the Moon.

Dr. Cameron was a former associate director for planetary sciences at Harvard and was chairman of its astronomy department from 1976 to 1982.

He and others, principally William K. Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, proposed the impact theory in the 1970's and developed it in later decades. The two scientists had been working independently on the idea when Dr. Hartmann presented his research at a meeting at Cornell in 1974.

The origin of the Moon has been a long standing problem in astrophysics. Lest you think it's been completely solved, there are still arguments about getting all the angular momentum balanced out from Cameron's theory.

Ummm... That's What 'Coverup' Means David

I haven't posted anything on the Scooter indictment in part because I wanted to get my thoughts together and in part I wanted to see how things shake out.

I disagree in general with the celebratory mood over at Kos. This is not "Fitzmas" or some crazy thing, this is a potential tragedy and no American ought to be partying over this. If true, it means that the highest level of government conspired to mislead the American public and hide the evidence deep enough so that investigators could not find it.

I also disagree with the folks at National Review who seem to have taken up the "trivial perjury" talking points. Again, if true, there is nothing trivial about this.

I also can't quite figure out the mood at RedStates who seem to think this week was just a bad one and now they can get back to running the country into the ground. I think there is a lot of fall out yet to come and the elected GOP folks are going to try to get some distance from the president.

Then there is Volokh where the mood is sober, the discussion enlightened and the partisanship minimal. Quite refreshing.

Finally, there is this totally outer space piece by David Brooks today:

But he did not find evidence to prove that there was a broad conspiracy to out a covert agent for political gain. He did not find evidence of wide-ranging criminal behavior. He did not even indict the media's ordained villain, Karl Rove. And as the former prosecutors Robert Ray and Richard Ben-Veniste said on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," he gave little indication he was going to do that in the future.

I sent the following email to Mr. Brooks:

David,

You're missing the point. The point of the perjury and making false statements charges is that Mr. Libby has hidden any possible evidence well enough that the Justice Department couldn't find it. It doesn't mean, at this point, that evidence doesn't exist. Assuming Mr. Libby is cleared of these charges, one can then safely assume there was no crime.

Sometimes I can't believe I paid money to read his craptastic logic.

Sulu

Geoff: Dad, I know something you don't
Dad: probably. What this time?
Geoff: George Taki is gay.
Dad: Sulu? I knew that. Everyone knows that.
Geoff: No, it just came out.
Dad: Impossible. If I've known for years, then everybody knows.
Geoff: No, it just came out.
Dad: He. He just came out. I can't imagine this is news.
Geoff: It is!

Sin and Insanity

A friend of mine has recently crossed the border from "eccentric with spats of violence and delusion" into actual full-blown insanity. Real brain dysfunction causing emotional and cognitive problems which cannot be treated with any form of counseling and may not be responsive to psychopharmacology. I feel badly for him and worse for the people he's hurt along the way, especially his children who have grown up never knowing if they were going to be with good dad or bad dad. While good dad was often generous, supportive and loving, bad dad would bit the heads off dolls, throw things across the room or, as I once witnessed, run naked from the shower to scream and berate the children for some random, perceived misdeed. While not a fan of the government making familial decisions, I am relieved that he does not have custody of his kids. However, he does have visitation which he uses randomly and unfortunately good dad is increasingly less a part of those visits. It has reached a crisis point and I suspect my friend is going to be institutionalized.

Which brings me to this thread. I've heard a lot about souls, free-will and choices. I know the story of Adam which is a good allegory of choice and consequence in some ways. I've also read a little on what the Catholic church ahs to say on the subject of insanity, sin and responsibility. At least as far as I can find, they dodge it. The church agrees that if one is born insane, they aren't responsible for their actions and they are not sins. Actually to my mind this brings up 2 questions, 1) do the insane have a soul if they are never responsible for their actions and 2) why does god create people insane from birth? Scientifically I understand this, but from the point of view of beings with a "soul" , specifically born to make choices and go to heaven or hell it seems ... not very well thought out.

What about those that are going insane? What about people who, like my friend, are seemingly sane at some time and insane at another?

One idea is that the insane are not responsible for their actions. However, the Catholic Encyclopedia points out that, while a humane policy, it's directly in conflict with church doctrine:

The theory does, indeed, seem to disagree with the doctrine of our textbooks of moral philosophy and theology, which maintains that freedom of the will can be diminished or destroyed only through defective or confused action of the intellect.

In other words, through choices. This makes sense theologically since the soul is all about choice and if physical changes to the body can change our choices, it puts the soul and one's responsibilities into a very shaky area.

Its an interesting problem.

Kudos to Kurzweil

I read a great deal of Ray's book yesterday on the plane from Seattle to Boston, and came away, as usual, unwillingly impressed by Ray. I had been prepared to write the following one line review of his book:

“Ray Kurzweil has written a Harlequin Romance novel for the technoratti.”

This was based primarily on the conversations I used to have with him and generally how they went. At KAI it would usually be Vlad and I against Ray and Francis on these topics and I'd bet my last dollar each side believed that it came out the better. Unfortunately I can't write that line for my review, it would be neither completely honest or fair. There are, however, elements of the romance novel in it.

First, the highlights:
I mentioned the other day that, while looking at in the bookstore, I read an appendix where Ray tries to give a mathematical justification for the singularity. The basic issue I had with it is that he made an assumption which I thought was unjustified and, if cast ever-so-slightly differently ( and more honestly in a scientific sense), the effect goes away. I sat down afterward and wrote what I thought was the more objective equation, solved it for a family of solutions and saw how Ray's solution was a subset within that superset. Ray's not wrong, just ... judicious in his choice of parameters. Upon looking through the book at leisure, I found that Ray had gone over this criticism in full. Not only had he enclosed a version of what I thought was the right general solution, he spent some time explaining why he thought he chose a conservative solution and argued that his solution should be stronger than it was.

Kudos to Ray for doing this.

However, his justification for doing this is circular. It basically boils down to, we know a singularity is coming, if I chose this parameter and do some math I get and equation with a singularity, therefore a singularity is coming. Q.E.D.

The basic problem is how strongly "the rate of technological change" couples to "the amount of knowledge in the world". Squishy concepts to be writing equations for in the first place. Ray assumes the coupling is directly proportional at least and maybe proportional to the square or some higher exponent. I take the more conservative approach and say while I think it's proportional, there are alot of other things the "amount of world knowledge" is dependent upon and say it's some power law X^(n) where 0<n<1. In Ray's solution you eventually get a singularity, in mine you "merely" get exponential growth. Given that nothing in nature (yes even black holes) generates a true singularity, I think mine is a more prudent set of assumptions. Ray, always the optimist, disagrees.

Also, kudos to Ray for directly confronting a lot of critical arguments. He has a whole chapter on a dozen or so objections people raise (I only thought of 3 or 4 of them). Some of them like, computers don't have souls so god will not recognize them as sentient beings, seem... too esoteric or philosophical for me. While I applaud him for raising them, I was not convinced about how he dismisses them, mostly with one version or another of "trust me, it will all be great".

The rest of the book is good and if you're one of the folks that already believes this is going to happen, this will help you rationalize believing that. While I was unconvinced of the approach of a singularity in 2050, the consolation prize (exponential growth) is pretty good and I do happen to believe that. Ray does a superlative job of laying out the current direction of technology, innovation and growth. He does a less successful job with economics, i.e. scarcity is solved and we all live in a communist utopia in 2050, law, human nature and, surprising to me, the nature of the eventual AIs.

This last point bears some explanation as I learned everything I know about AI from working at Ray's company, but not from Ray. It's also important to note here that Ray himself did not work on research or code at KAI. While I think he he understands AI very well, I don't think he quite gets what is going on in there. Basically his assumption is that neural nets will mimic the human brain and that the AIs the come in 2050 will all be human-based benevolent gods who (more or less) love us and keep as pets. My view is different. I think the AIs will be as alien to us as the dolphins, chimps and whales are. Actually, more so, as the latter all have meaty brains, meaty urges, meaty lusts and above all, meaty motivations. I think the AIs will be nothing like us at all, with no sense of nostalgia, no sense of history or parentage etc. In short, from our perspective as humans, they will be functionally psychotic, with nothing to ground them in the meat world and no real allegiance to us. It's likely to be more like Skynet than the Eschaton. Humans are not likely to understand the monomania and motivations of real AI based superintelligence and, if it understands us at all, it's not likely to care.

However, while never in doubt, I am often wrong and hopefully that is the case here. Read the book, it's got a lot going for it despite my reservations.

And, like a said, exponential growth is a damn fine consolation prize.

If, in 2051, I'm reading this as a disembodied consciousness floating just outside Tau Ceti IV, I'll enthusiastically cop to having been a doubter.

The Cutest Picture Ever

Which I would file under "Things Man Was Not Meant To See".

Here.

Sign up for the Liftport Newsletter while you are over there.

BAG News

I went to BAG news to see what was going on with the marketing of the current crisis. I was explaining to Jim that, while not an expert, I have accidently become knowledgable about marketing. I was giving the Nixon example when the page loaded.

I laughed for a full minute.

Jim's patience knows no bounds.

Currently Reading: The Singualrity Is Near

By Ray Kurzweil

Yeah, I'm reading Ray's book. I took a gratuitous pot-shot at him the other day, calling his idea that the singularity will happen in his lifetime a fantasy. I worked for him for nearly four years and, while I can't say we were friends or even very close, you could not work for KAI (Kurzweil AI) for more than 4 hours without getting a heaping spoonful of Ray's ideas (and a lesser, but potent dose of his optimism). Kathy, Amy and Mike, also KAI alum(1) and occasionally blog readers (Hi Guys!) should feel especially free to chime in here if I'm being too soft or mush-headed. Especially you Mike(2) After the pot-shot I figured the least I could do was read his book and base some of my judgment on that.

I did skip to the appendix in the store though and read his mathematical proof of the singularity. The math was flawless and straight-forward. It was also based on an incorrect assumption, rendering the proof invalid. Not a stunning start.


(1) In the interests of honestly and full disclosure, I am not actually a member of Listen to Me. "Listen to Me" was the phrase one used to activate the interactive mode of the recognizer and serves today as the name of the alumni news letter. My occasional petition for membership is always quietly rejected in part because many of the members of "Listen to Me" were people I either had fired or fired myself. The news-letter operator, Steve Rothman, was my boss for awhile at KAI. I got him fired.

(2) technically I own Mike's soul. I bought it for $5 one afternoon and so I feel justified in occasionally using the imperative voice with him. Mike is another Atheist and a good friend.

2 Bits of Minor News

Bit 1: My new Motorola MPx220 smart phone arrived today. It's pimped out in every way I could think of, Bluetooth, Sim card, Quad band, MS Magneto OS, Internet and corporate email, etc. Very nice, although a little higher on the phone tech scale than I'm used to. My New number is 207 415 XXXX* Why a phone bought in Seattle has a Maine phone number, I'll never understand.

Call me when you get a chance, or email me at work Mark.Horvath@microsoft.com. I should get it either way!

Bit 10: I'm heading back to Boston tomorrow where I'l be in town for the better part of 3 weeks. 5 days of that I'm spending in the Lahey Clinic, 4 days in Dallas and 2 in New York, but other than that (21-5-4-2 = 10) I'll be home in an empty place with Jim, the cats, 2 chairs and a plastic table.

And my smart phone! :)

*Geoff rightly points out that, although the readership is small, google remembers things forever. Call the old number for the new

An Amusing, Agreeable Point on ID

From William Saletan

This soft-headed agnosticism matches the soft-headed arguments for including it in the curriculum. They're the same arguments leftists have made for ebonics. According to ID proponents, the committee in charge of Ohio's science curriculum is too "homogenous" and lacks "diversity." It marginalizes alternative "points of view" to which students should be "exposed." A conservative state senator says some people "think differently, and all those ideas should be explored." A conservative member of the state education board says Ohioans deserve a science curriculum "they can all be comfortable with."

Well said.

Devil Woman

You can almost smell the brimstone from this USA Today photo.







These kinds of things sell papers of course, but I dread to think what they'll do to her when she's VP.

Roars

I'm almost finished with Mary Roach's excellent book Spook. It's exactly the kind of book that the psuedo-scientific religious find extremely unconfortable because it comes up with rational pedestrian explainations for things which many report to be evidence of the supernatural. It's done in a non-condecending, humorous tone and Mary, like me and many others, want to believe in some of this stuff but can't find any reason to.

Part of Spook focuses on ghosts and hauntings and, at least so far, is one of the best parts of the book. Disclaimer: When I was young, until about the age of 11 or 12, I saw ghosts from time to time. I vividly remember them when I was 5 or 6 and would still hear things/feel things at night into my teen years. Mary goes through this pretty throughly and does a great job talking about how humans precieve infrasound and how we react. Infrasound is the term for an acoustic (longitudinal) wave with a frequency between 10 and 20 hertz, just below the threshold for hearing. You still precieve sounds this low, you just don't hear them. What do you do? Well, you panic a little.
It turns out that a lot of animals communicate by infrasound, especially ones with large territories to defend. The beauty of low frequency waves is that they travel for fucking ever, so if your an elephant or a rhino or a whale, infrasound is a good investment for you.

Or, if you're a tiger.

It turns out tigers communiate a lot through infrasound and humans (or at least soem humans who have not yet ruined their ears by playing the Yes Album at 120db for 18 hours a day) respond rather strongly to this.

It also turns out that your PC speakers can do a pretty good approximation of sounds in this range.

So, I went to a site Mary suggested here, read through and scrolled down to the first speaker. I hit the button, fully prepared to hear a tiger roar. And I did. What I was not prepared for, so much so that I burst out laughing afterwards at my foolishness, was the little spike of pure fear that came with it. I litterally got goosebumps. I played it a few more times and realized that part of what I felt was the little dark feeling of something in the room I had when I was a kid. Add to that the dark, too much imagination and some religion classes and I am fully satisfied I understand the creepiness feeling.

Now I want to do two things: 1) I want to watch Ghost Hunters again on Sci-Fi. I watched a few times hoping they would find something, but they never seemed to come up with anything convincing. I want to see if they are in environments which are likely to be good ultrasound resonators. and 2)


I want to play these sounds for the cats...

The Talking Points Memo

If you have not read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo on the Italians, the faked Nigerian Yellowcake documents and the Office of Special Operations, your missing the best stuff in news reporting.

If you're not keeping up, there will be a point in the near future where you say to yourself "Why did that happen". If you read this, you'll have a better idea why Cheney gets indicted.

Excellent Pictures From Iraq

Excellent photo essay on Iraq.

Andrew Sullivan's Excellent Point and the 5 Most Dangerous Words in the English Language

Simple and effective, as most clever things are. I don't know why I didn't htink to ask this, but I didn't.
THE SOCIAL RIGHT AND GAYS: My debate with David Blankenhorn on the matter of marriage rights is now posted. In many ways, I think the most telling part of the conversation was at the very end. Blankenhorn was asked a simple question by a member of the audience: since you oppose marriage rights for gay couples, what do you support for them? What's amazing is that after decades of thinking about marriage and several years mulling the issue of marriage for gays, David still had no answer. Frum has no answer. Gallagher has no answer. Kurtz has no answer. I have to say I find this quite extraordinary. It is as extraordinary as the social right's complete indifference to the revolution in gay culture and society these past two decades. I just read Rick Santorum's book about conservatism and the "common good." It's better than I expected and has many pages devoted to excluding gay couples from civil marriage. But again: I could find no practical, constructive suggestion from Santorum on what he believes should be our civil policy toward gay couples. Should they be deterred from settling down? Should they be encouraged to make faithful commitments? Should their households, when they include offspring, be legally protected? Silence. Nada. Zip. The "common good" does not include gay people or their kids. For much of the social right, homosexuals simply do not exist. Our reality is so threatening to them that they cannot even begin to construct a viable social policy toward us. And that's why they're losing this debate. In many ways, they haven't even joined it.

The Right can't simply come out and say, "stop existing", it's too late for that and anyone with a modicum of decency would be turned off. No, they can't answer because, like similar folk on the Left, the truth is unspeakable. Like their tutors on the Left, it's better to make some seemingly positive social policies (and damn the consequences) and quickly change the subject.

The 5 most dangerous words in the English Language are still:
Maybe it will go away.

Donald Trump, Forever

I've been working on the book a little this week after getting some stuff settled in Seattle and finishing some travel. The outline is hovering around 40 pages or so, and I'm starting to fill in details specific to one or two areas. Right now I'm working on life extension and the Corporate Senate sections, the former much harder than the latter.

In looking at trends in human history, there are a couple that might serve as models; 1) Cheap, easy and culture shifting, 2) expensive, rare and elite and 3) for lack of a better work, genetic or evolutionary.

1) Cheap, easy, culture shifting: The model here is electricity or the phone (or these days the internet). Everyone (or almost everyone with rare exceptions) has access, it quickly dives under the cultural radar (heard any Tesla jokes lately?) and isn't news except when it's missing. Many technologies eventually go this route. However, I don't think life extension will be one of them, at least not soon. Ray Kurzweil's fantasies aside, the singularity is not as close as people think, nano technology has been Real Soon Now for decades and, well, even stuff from the '50s like cheap fusion is still (and has always been) 20 years away. I think LE is not going to be a simple nutritional supplement, but a complete re-write of your DNA, or at least extending certain parts of it into every cell in your body. This is hard, uncertain work and biology isn't physics (it's vastly more complicated). Immortality won't be coming in a pill for a long time I think, so for the next 150 years or so, I'm ruling this one out.

2) Expensive, rare and elite. Everyone has a car (in the US) but how many people have McClearens? Not fucking me that's for sure. Delorian tried but failed. I think if LE is as complicated as I suspect, the first few iterations on existing humans may only be partly successful and I expect it to be very expensive. Also, the economics of it would seem to me (a non-economist) to keep it rare, i.e. providers could charge huge amounts of money for it because absolutely everyone would want it. It's unlikely to be covered by a healthcare plan especially when these days more and more plans are getting away from expensive treatments and looking for workers who won't get sick at all.

There is an argument to be made that folks could finance their LE and pay it out of their multi-hundred/thousand year lifespan. However, for those arguments to make real sense, you a) need the first few folks to live a sizeable fraction of that to prove it actually works (medical breakthroughs have an unfortunate history of not working quite as well as planned, e.g. seen any Jarvik artificial hearts around? Not a mean criticism, it's just a hard, hard problem in a complex system) and b) you need actuarial tables for those lifespans. LE doesn't mean you can't get hit by a car, slip in the shower etc. To point b), I talked to a number of insurance actuarials about this (my job brings me in contact with all sorts of interesting folks) and this is a known problem some few folks have worked on. Assuming immorality, your mean time to a fatal accident is somewhere between 800-1500 years. This also assumes that LE confers immunity to all disease, an assumption I can't see justifying. I don't see folks financing more than a small fraction of this, say 100 years or so. Hence, not may people will be able to afford it. Trumps, Hiltons, Gates etc. maybe, but not you or I. Well, not I.
Result: Donald Trump might be with us for a long time, but fortunately we'll die and not have to watch.

3)Genetic, evolutionary. I see some home for this. If we can build genes, or better yet eggs and sperm, we could build the LE genes right in from birth. This avoids a lot of problems in 2) and gets us to 1) (or at least set up for 1)) in a relatively short time. It's comparatively simple, cheaper than doing it after the system has booted (but likely not cheap) and might be workable. I call this the Gattica option and, while personally fond of it, it means pretty directly playing god with peoples lives (or future lives). I can't see this being popular for a few hundred years until a population of Gatticans gets large enough to vote in significant numbers. Again, this won't be available to everyone, so 2,000 years from now, we all might be Gates, or Fords, or Trumps.

This is evolution in action in the brave, new world.

I'm certainly open to other arguments, corrections, or debates on why I have my head up my ass, but this is the direction I'm going to head on this.

Texas Leads the Way!

I see the Texans have already made a good start at getting government out of the bedroom and off our backs (via Volokh)

Opponents of a proposed amendment to the Texas Constitution banning same-sex marriage said Monday the initiative's poor wording could effectively nullify all marriages.
Proposition 2 on the Nov. 8 ballot states that marriage exists only as a union of one man and one woman.
It then adds that the state or political subdivision of the state "may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."
"That in the hands of an activist judge could lead to the ruin of my marriage and every other marriage in this state because the status that is most identical to marriage is obviously marriage itself," said Trampes Crow, a graduate student at the University of Texas and a former army captain who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I'd say it's still in Captain Crow's hands to save or ruin his own marriage, but folks like to have a State to blame...

Tax the Permanently Single

This seems to be a point of surprise to some, but I think this is really just the enfranchisement of a new group in an existing process (Gregg Easterbrook, via Cathy Young, via Volokh)

If significant numbers of gays and lesbians begin to wed, the 100 million single people may become more dismayed that still more people wearing rings get special deals while they do not. Equally important, for every gay or lesbian pair who weds, winning benefits, a couple of single people must be taxed more to fund these benefits. Benefits can't just be demanded; someone must provide them. Marriage benefits for gays and lesbians will not come from the pockets of those in traditional one-man-one-woman unions. The benefits will come from the pockets of the single.
You chortle now, but as same-gender unions gain acceptance, prejudice against the single may become the final frontier. Marriage definitely isn't for everyone; some people were made by God to be single, and why should society punish them for that? Millions of people wish to marry but cannot find suitable partners; why should society punish them for that? The single makes substantial contributions to society, including often assisting in the all-important raising of children. Many single people form long-term or even life-long bonds to each other based not on eros but Platonic friendship; why shouldn't such people be able to pool their credit, inherit each other's property without taxation, and so on? ... At any rate, complaints from the single seem the next logical progression of this debate, and complaints from the single are going to be hard to rebut.

There are a couple of small problems with this argument but mostly just in magnitude, e.g. a number of gay people are already married to opposite sexed spouses, they just aren't happy, so in detail-balance this is a much smaller increase than it might look; the number of gays is statistically small (about 4% of the general population in the US) and the number of those who would marry is even smaller, so I'm not sure the magnitude of the problem would be detectable in the noise of the current data; 80% of gays are reproductively successful at some point in their lives so, to within a good approximation of non-gays, they are producing single folks to take up the burden, etc.

But, it's still a good point, one I'm surprised no one is really making on the other side. My solution, as always, is to get government out of the marriage business. Stop subsidies/penalties for doing it and make it a purely religious institution.

Also, take the time to ready Cathy Young's article. It's excellent, and makes the points Maggie Gallagher tried but really failed to make.

Nipple Clamps

I love wonkette.
• Maybe it was her sexy nipple clamps that made Kay Bailey Hutchison forget all about blowjobs.

Talking Points:Perjury

Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but it's also damn useful. Back during the Monica thing I was consistent in two things: 1) Congress had no business investigating the president's blow-job and 2) Clinton needed to tell the truth. While I had a lot of sympathy for the man while he was having his consensual dirty laundry aired, I didn't condone lying to cover it up.

Like everyone else, I heard the new GOP talking points yesterday by Sen. Hutchison,
"that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

The fact that the GOP flips 180 on this only when it's their ox being gored, makes me want to vote for them even less than I already do. Note: This also represents small minded consistency on my part as I stopped voting for dems on the same principle.

And, in case the GOP has forgotten their eagerness, well some helpful folks can help remind them of how they looked at this a few years ago. If anyone is stupid enough to take up the new talking points, I hope their opponents crucify them with ads in 2006.

Sen. Hutchison: "The reason that I voted to remove him from office is because I think the overridding issue here is that truth will remain the standard for perjury and obstruction of justice in our criminal justice system and it must not be gray. It must not be muddy." [AP, 2/12/99]

Sen. Frist: "There is no serious question that perjury and obstruction of justice are high crimes and misdemeanors...Indeed, our own Senate precedent establishes that perjury is a high crime and misdemeanor...The crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice are public crimes threatening the administration of justice." [Congressional Record, 2/12/99]

Sen. DeWine: "Obstruction of justice and perjury strike at the very heart of our system of justice...Perjury is also a very serious crime...The judiciary is designed to be a mechanism for finding the truth-so that justice can be done. Perjury perverts the judiciary, turning it into a mechanism that accepts lies-so that injustice may prevail." [Congressional Record, 2/12/99]

Apt comment on Harriet

Found in my mail this morning, care of the Strawberry Woman:

I give Miers no chance. She is Thomas without the pubic hair.

To which I can only add, in the faint praise category,

or the reasoning skills.

Truth in Advertising

Administration apologist and Harriet Miers Junior Fan Club President Bill O'Reilly on the Today show this week:

The Center of the Galaxy

Another great image from the APOD. This is the best picture of the center of the galaxy I've ever seen.

Superman is a Dick

I hadn't thought of it like this.

She Doesn't Take a Good Photo

Recent WH pictures featuring Harriet in her second re-launch as a product.

Wow. They can't take a good picture of the woman.

The thing here is not so much Harriet herself (intrade is currently got her at about 32% chance of winning), but the seeming incompetence of the WH team in getting her going. This is the first product they've tried to move without Rove (this has been Andy Card's game from start to finish for various reasons) and, frankly, it shows. Candidate photos are basic blocking and tackling though. I don't quite know they are managing to screw that up, it's known science.

If Rove does get an indictment, I wonder if Bush will issue a blanket pardon to keep the WH afloat?

Interacting Galaxies

APOD has an excellent picture today of an interacting galaxy.
I used to have some code around I got from one of my fellow grad students at UMass, Kevin Olson, who modeled this kind of thing for his thesis. I haven't touched it for awhile, but I remember last time thinking, "Wow! This runs shitloads* faster on this pentium than it did on the VAX-750"

Tropical Storm Alpha

Yup, it's official! Tropical Storm Alpha is now chugging along off the coast of the DR.

Alpha is forecast to move northwestward for thenext 12-24 hours around the anticyclone to the northeast...thenrecurve to the northe and eventually northeast ahead of Wilma andthe large deep-layer baroclinic trough forming over the easternUnited States. The official track forecast has Alpha beingabsorbed by the trough in 96 hours if not sooner.
Alpha is forecast to slowly intensify in the next 12 hours prior to
making landfall along the South Coast of Hispaniola. After
weakening over the mountains some brief re-intensification is
possible prior to the cyclone being absorbed into the larger system
to the northwest.

Intrade

Tradesports for Politics.
Or rather for more politics.
or something

The Tab Key FAQ

Here

Q. I put some quarters in and pushed the Tab button, but nothing happened. Where’s my soda?

A. Do not stick loose change into the slots in your keyboard.

Volokh SSM Debate

Well, Maggie Gallagher's week of SSM debate is over. It ends with this:

No time to introduce you to the joys of theories of the cognitive nature of social institutions, the relevance of the New Institutionalist Economics understanding of isomorphic institutional change, the developing legal pressures in Canada to repress opposition to its new normative understanding of marriage, or even why I think the most likely outcome of same-sex marriage is not polygamy but the end of marriage as a legal status.

Which is to say, "I saved all my really good arguments this week for the end and oops, I've run out of time!"

I read her arguments, the threads they generated etc. First let me says it was fairly gutsy on her part to do this at all. Sure, Volokh is generally read by conservatives, but they are conservative lawyers and as such are pretty good at the process of debate. I give her a lot of credit for volunteering for this. If I were more cynical than I actually am, I might think this was a plot to trot out weak arguments and have them strengthened by debate. I'm not really that cynical though and, of course, that's not what happened.

Update: I had written a kind of rambling entry about why I thought she hadn't made her point. However, in reading through the comments, I found someone had articualted it better.

Revealed Preference

A good note on Andrew Sullivan today on revealed preferences in the abortion debate:

"The arguments for and against aborting babies who will be born with disabilities are not much different than the arguments for abortion in general. If you believe that the fetus is a person from the start, then the consistent position is not to abort babies with disabilities. After all, they are people, and just as you would not euthanise them after they were born, or as adults, you would not kill them before they are born. On the other hand, if you believe that the fetus is not yet a person, then deliberately allowing a disabled child to be born is akin to abuse.

Just as you would not maim a child after it is born in order to cause mental or physical handicaps, you would also not allow such a child to form in the first place when you could avoid it.

In other Revealed Preference news, I would suggest I have accidentally revealed that I'm not the big left-leading liberal I thought. When the choice came to take a job in Washington state vs. staying in Massachusetts (arguably the bluest state currently still in the union), I chose to move. The money is the same in both cases, the housing situation is about equal etc., so the conclusion I come to is that the value of living there, despite laws which were favorable and a good political climate were minor compared with the novelty of exploring a new area of the country.

Also in Media Training News...

BAGNews has some interesting comments on the optics of the Saddam Trial.
Largely political neutral commentary, BTW. If your a weary Right Winger, you probably don't need your nose rubbed it.