Crowdsyncing

May 18, 2012 – 12:19 pm

Here’s a novel approach to implementing coordinated behavior in a non-hierarchical “swarm” of autonomous machines:

Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour.

It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process called quorum sensing. This works by constantly releasing signalling molecules into the environment while at the same time measuring the local concentration of these molecules.

This concentration rises as more creatures join the local population and so is an effective measure of population density. When the concentration rises over some threshold level, it triggers a different behaviour such cell division, pathogen production and nest building.

Now [Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge] say a similar approach provides a robust way to synchronise humanoid robots. The ideal approach to synchronisation is for each robot to have access to every other robot’s position. Instead, the quorum sensing approach gives, each robot access to a global variable such as the average position or average clock time. Each robot can also change this variable because it contributes to the average.

The idea is that if each robot attempts to synchronise with this global average, the swarm as whole should keep good time.

This insight seems applicable to much more than the dancing robots shown in the linked article. For example, the movement of the center of gravity of social and cultural trends over time surely involves some “quorum sensing” on the part of individuals, followed by “attempts to synchronize with this global average”.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (0)

Colin Quinn, 1959-2012

May 17, 2012 – 5:25 pm

Remember Colin Quinn? That Brooklyn comedian who was on Saturday Night Live for a while? I happened to be looking at Twitter just now and watched him destroy whatever was left of his professional life.

In response to the news that the majority of babies born in the USA are now non-white, he emitted this:

Just read white birth rates overtaken by other races in the U.S.? Please let that be somebody’s idea of a sick joke! #rightorwrong

…followed by this:

Nothing against anybody else but this is kind of..our country. Yes or no?

… and, fatally, this:

I’m not a racist who believes in white privelege [sic] but I do believe very strongly in white power.

Stick a fork in him.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (5)

Oh, Canada!

May 17, 2012 – 11:34 am

Attention, teens: if you need some help answering the call of the wild, then make your way to Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition, now running at Ottawa’s Museum of Science and Technology.

The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden dildos. There’s also a ‘climax room’ with a round, low, leather bed, red curtains, a video screen showing animations of aroused genitals, and the voice of a man describing an orgasm.

Next to close-up photos of adult genitals are video screens using animations to explain masturbation.

Attendees are asked to write their own words for penis and vagina on a digital screen, and slang-terms like c— and pussy for female genitalia and c— for male body parts, are displayed above it in large letters.

There are listening stations with pre-written questions and push button audio answers.

Next to a printed question asking, ‘Why do many boys always want to have anal sex?’ sexologist Jamy Ryan responds that not all boys want to do it, but: “If you are comfortable trying that activity, go ahead and do it. It could be fun for you, but if you are not, you don’t really have to do it.”

Next to a question about pregnancy, the recording assures listeners that abortions are available at medical clinics and at 14 years old, you don’t need to tell your parents.

Seems to me the staid Great White North has changed a bit since I left in 1956. All for the better, I’m sure.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Technology | Comments (1)

Chuck Brown, 1936-2012

May 16, 2012 – 4:02 pm

As if the news out of Washington D.C. weren’t already depressing enough, here’s an especially sad item: Chuck Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go”, has died at age 75.

As noted here, I was lucky enough to do a record with Chuck long ago, and the lovely Nina and I saw him play just last summer at the bandshell near our home here in Brooklyn.

At the time of his death Chuck Brown was, by any honest measure, the funkiest man alive. I’m sorry he’s gone.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain | Comments (0)

Sowell On Intellectuals

May 14, 2012 – 11:16 pm

For those of you who might enjoy it, here’s a five-part interview with Thomas Sowell on the role of intellectuals in modern democracies. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

Churchill said this, once upon a time:

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.

Spoiler: Dr. Sowell thinks they tend to gum things up, too, if you don’t keep an eye on them.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Synesthesia

May 14, 2012 – 9:55 pm

Ever since seeing Fantasia as a boy, I’ve been fascinated by animated renderings of music. Poking around online today I found two very different animations of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #6. Both are complete mappings of the musical score onto a scrolling visual display, and so both express the same information. I can’t decide, though, which one I think does a better job of communicating visually the flow and interplay of the composition’s several voices.

The comparison is not ideal, because the first clip animates the concerto’s first movement, and the second one animates the third. Also, the first clip features a far better performance than the second, which is obviously the output of a computer playing a programmed version of the score.

Both animations use vertical position to indicate pitch, and scroll horizontally through the score so that the notes currently being played are always in the center of the screen. Both renderings also color-code the individual musical voices. And there the similarities end.

The first animation, which is graphically far more sophisticated, uses colored circles to represent each note, strung along lines that mark off the half-dozen or so separate voices. As each note is struck, it appears as a circle whose initial size indicates the duration of the note. Each circle shrinks at the same rate, so that it has just shrunk to zero by the time the next note is struck. The circles bubble up on the right side of the screen, have their moment in the sun, then rush off to the left — solid before they are struck, and hollow afterwards. The visual effect is lively and effervescent, and in particular the vertically stacked circles that mark off the quarter-note pulse throughout most of the piece have a beautifully propulsive effect. It’s a marvelous piece of work.

The second animation is far simpler, but clearer too: it’s a simple graphic representation of exactly the same sort that one might see on a MIDI display of the score. The notes are horizontal bars, with vertical position representing pitch, and horizontal extension representing duration. As each note plays, it is is highlighted, then goes dark again. That’s it! There’s none of the fancy eye-candy we had in the first clip: the expansion and contraction of the horizontal scale as the circles approach the center, the changing sizes of the circles to represent the lifespan of each note, the passage from solid to hollow circles as each note is played — but the eye is much better able to follow the representation of each note, and to connect the visual input with the music. As much as I admired the creative ingenuity of the first animation, I found the second to be more effective in bringing eye and ear together in a unitary experience.

Have a look. Which do you like better?

(Also: was Bach a genius, or what?)

Oh, and lest we forget: here’s another way of doing this sort of thing.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Music and Recording | Comments (10)

Forward!

May 12, 2012 – 9:30 pm

I’ve mentioned “exponentially advancing technology” a lot lately. Think I was kidding?

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Lost And Found

May 12, 2012 – 1:14 pm

Here’s a poignant item from the Daily Mail: a P-40 Kittyhawk lost in the Sahara 70 years ago has just been discovered, preserved in the sands.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

No Skyhook, But A Damned Fine Crane

May 10, 2012 – 10:19 pm

Our reader Henry has sent along a thought-provoking item about a mechanism by which complex systems can bootstrap themselves into existence: autocatalytic sets. The idea is particularly intriguing in its metaphorical generality, and its applicability may well extend beyond chemistry to social and political domains as well.

Have a look. An explanatory article is here, the scientific paper mentioned in the article is here, and a Wikipedia entry on the subject is here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (2)

He Does

May 9, 2012 – 5:57 pm

The big news of the day is that President Obama, after years of reticence on the topic, has just announced that he supports same-sex marriage.

I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt Romney, and although a majority of blacks oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (the latest poll I’ve seen reported 55% opposed and 42% in favor), I doubt that this will cost Mr. Obama much, if any, of his lock on the black vote.

Interestingly, Mr. Obama also said that although he personally approves of same-sex marriage, he thought that decisions about its legality should be left to the States. (Indeed, this just happened yesterday, with North Carolina voters rejecting the idea by a wide margin.) I mention this because I can’t think, offhand, of any other examples of Mr. Obama endorsing this sort of federalism; it isn’t generally his style at all.

Another interesting question, what with a Mormon standing as Mr. Obama’s opponent this fall: what percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage would object to the legalization of polygamous marriages? On what principled basis can they do so?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (16)

Wheels Within Wheels

May 8, 2012 – 11:49 pm

My, so many interesting things afoot in the Gulf and environs lately! Much to think about:

— The ongoing game between AQAP and the Saudis…

— …in particular, between Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri and Mohammed bin Nayef (little brother Abdullah Asiri having already sacrificed his life in vain on that score);

— That Fahd al-Quso was probably painted by the mole that got the upgraded package, no doubt with Saudi assistance;

— That Lil’ Squinty has been putting his feet down in the Tunbs, which is calculated to make the Emirates edgy and annoy the Saudis;

— That al-Asiri’s previous venture was thwarted in Abu Dhabi;

— That PETN is such damnable stuff: hard to detect and you don’t need much of it;

— That there is no question about which of the two Gulf powers AQAP and their pals in the Horn seem to willing to make common cause with, though they make strange bedfellows…

And that’s all just for starters. It’s enough to make your head spin.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (4)

A Tale Of Two Systems

May 8, 2012 – 7:14 pm

East Germany, before and after.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

Half Of What I say Is Meaningless – But I Say It Just to Reach You, Julia

May 7, 2012 – 11:48 am

As depressing as presidential campaigns are, they can be entertaining, too, as long as you enjoy forms of entertainment that don’t cheer you up. President Obama just gave us a good example with his latest promotional offering, The Life of Julia, which chronicles a faceless, solitary woman’s journey “forward” from cradle to grave, apparently without family or friends, as a dependent ward of the welfare state and grateful consumer of its “free” benefits. At every step, the reader is reminded that it is Mr. Barack Obama from whom all of Julia’s blessings flow (even though, at the later stops along her timeline, Mr. Obama will have been out of office for decades) — whereas Mitt Romney’s Dickensian aim is to grind the poor, helpless gamin to dust in the gears of his soulless capitalist machine.

As you’d expect, this item has evoked a lively response from the Right. For sheer entertainment value it would be hard to top Iowahawk’s riposte, which you can have a look at here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Danse Macabre

May 6, 2012 – 1:51 pm

There’s a sad front-page article in today’s New York Times about frontotemporal dementia, a family of degenerative brain diseases that gradually destroy not only various skills and cognitive functions, but also the essential nature of a patient’s personality. These diseases are stark reminders that what we are — that all of what we are — is a transient pattern woven in the matter of the world, a dance of atoms and energy that persists briefly, then subsides.

What is constant in all of this? What gives continuity to the “self” that connects yesterday to today to tomorrow, that makes promises today that must be kept days or months or years hence? Nothing, it seems, but the dance. The “dancers”, the individual atoms and molecules and cells and squirts of neurotransmitters — those come and go; what carries our past forward into the present and the future is nothing more than a dynamic and ephemeral configuration, like the waves of the ocean or the Great Red Spot.

These personality-annihilating illnesses are so particularly heartbreaking because they attack and destroy one of our most cherished illusions, the foundation upon which we orient ourselves in relation to others: the grounding of individual personhood in the continuity of identity. Our institutions, and indeed the social instincts from which these institutions arise and take their form, assume this continuity as their axiomatic bedrock — but as these diseases demonstrate, the ground is not so stable, and for the person whose spouse simply is no longer the person she married, the effect is surely as devastating, and as terrifying at the most primordial level, as an earthquake.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (9)

Cheap Date

May 4, 2012 – 10:27 pm

Here’s a remarkable critter: a plant-animal chimera called Elysia chlorotica. Once it has dined on enough algae to prime its photosynthetic pump, it lives on nothing but sunlight, and never needs to eat again. Amazing.

More photos here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Curiosities | Comments (1)

Gene Pool

May 3, 2012 – 9:41 pm

Many years ago I stumbled across a book called The Descent of Woman, by Elaine Morgan. It was the first I’d ever heard of something called the “aquatic ape hypothesis”, which claims that certain features of the human body — our hairless skin, our bipedalism, and some other things you can read about here — suggest that our species spent a transitional period in its evolutionary history living in the water.

I thought it was an interesting idea, and was actually quite besotted with it for a while. It never gained anything like mainstream acceptance, though (upon briefly meeting Stephen Jay Gould some time later, I asked him about it, whereupon he rolled his eyes and said “Oh God, that awful book” and proceeded to rattle off a series of devastating objections, many of which you can read at the article linked above).

I hadn’t heard anything about it for a very long time, when today I was walking down the street and saw a man sporting a t-shirt that advertised “The Museum of the Aquatic Ape”. I went home and looked it up, and sure enough, there really is such a place — or a strange little website, anyway. I hardly know what to make of it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology | Comments (1)

Lost World

May 2, 2012 – 9:55 pm

It’s been a long day at work, but I might have managed to write a post nevertheless — had I not lost myself for the past hour at the infinitely engaging (at least for a well-seasoned old gaffer like me) ‘miscellaneous” page at Lileks.com.

Have a look for yourself.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Forward!

May 1, 2012 – 2:27 pm

We note with some surprise the Obama campaign’s adoption of the word Forward as its new slogan.

The word has, of course, been a rallying cry of socialists and Marxists for a very long time — so much so that Wikipedia even has an entry about it.

Perhaps this indicates a refreshing frankness on the part of the campaign, a willingness to fly their true colors, so that voters can make a genuinely informed choice — to call, as it were, a spade a spade, on the assumption that socialism is in fact what a lot of Mr. Obama’s essential coalition actually wants.

At the very least: as dog whistles go, that’s a pretty low-frequency one.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (25)

Eat Your Peas!

May 1, 2012 – 12:39 pm

Uh-oh — according to Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, maybe we’d better not.

We reserve comment.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (1)

Seriously?

April 30, 2012 – 10:34 pm

Here’s an item from NightWatch‘s Robert McCreary:

Iran: For the record. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei provided the following guidance in response to a question about whether it was sinful to use social media.

“In general, the use of social networking websites (such as Facebook, FriendFeed, Orkut, etc) is impermissible if their use entails a corrupt action (such as promoting corruption, spreading lies and false subjects) or if it creates fear of committing a sin, or if it boosts the enemies of Islam and Muslims, or if it is against the Islamic Republic’s laws.”

Comment: Khamenei’s comment is worth noting by a Western Readership for two reasons. First is that it shows how Shi’i Muslims are expected to ask their role models for emulation – the ayatollahs — for guidance on everyday activities ranging from eating to using social media.

The second reason is that the Ayatollah’s response conflates fear of committing sin with violations of the laws of the Islamic Republic or just boosting the enemies of Islam. In this moral architecture, illegality and evil are the same. That means that a traffic offense or other violation of national law is a sin, just like failure to keep the Ramadan fast, for example.

That is not how Iranian law works in daily practice, to be sure, but it is the thinking of the religious leadership and the extremely devout. The West generally abandoned such thinking before the Renaissance.

Mr. McCreary’s comment, in turn, is worth noting in that it shows he felt the need to point out to Western readers what should be completely unremarkable to anyone with an understanding of Islam, and in particular Shi’a Islam: that it is a complete, all-embracing system that provides explicit instruction for every aspect of human life; that in Shi’a Islam the guidance of the Prophet is moderated by a divinely inspired clergy; and most important of all, that the separation of religious from secular authority — in other words, the subordination of man to Man’s laws rather than God’s — is a fundamental sin.

Rhetorical question: How, in this day and age, can any educated person living in the West not know all of this?

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (1)

Too Much Information

April 30, 2012 – 6:15 pm

Here’s a hilarious newspaper clipping, sent to Lawrence Auster by a reader:

Read the caption carefully.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (7)

First World Problem

April 30, 2012 – 6:04 pm

Here we are in 2012, and the most advanced technological civilization that has ever existed is stymied by three tons of meat in a log cabin.

What was it that Emerson said about hobgoblins?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

The Call Of The Wild

April 26, 2012 – 10:09 pm

First thing tomorrow I’m driving down to Milburn Landing State Park, near Pocomoke City, MD, for a weekend of camping with some boyhood chums: a long-overdue reunion inspired by a weekend we spent there 40 years ago this summer.

One of us lives in San Diego, one in Minnesota, one in Cincinnati, and one in Blacksburg, Virginia — so we almost never get to see each other. It’s really easy never to get around to things like this: you keep talking about it in a vague way, and the years roll by, and the next thing you know it’s too late, because you’re dead. Not this time, though!

Anyway, I’ll likely be right off the grid till next week. So here’s an entertaining video clip, just sent my way by my boy Nick: an experiment, involving monkeys, that, as the presenter mentions, goes a long way toward explaining Occupy Wall Street.

(After I watched it, though, I realized that to really get it right you’d need to have monkey A out digging up rocks, and monkey B just banging on the wall, throwing poo, and demanding half of monkey A’s grapes.)

Anyway, we’ll be back next week. I haven’t felt like writing much since getting back from California anyway; I’m still mulling things over, and sorting out what I want the tone of this blog to be going forward. Maybe this will get the juices flowing.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

News You Can Use

April 23, 2012 – 9:37 pm

Sitting for a portrait? Keep this in mind.

Going on a date? Head for Peter Luger’s.

Last, but not least: there’s no need to be glum just because Earth Day’s over. Not until you’ve read Iowahawk’s annual homage to Gaia, anyway.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Noose And Weather

April 23, 2012 – 4:05 pm

Here’s some murderous rage from Forbes contributor Steve Zwick, who is scouting out lamp-posts for those who refuse to fall in line with his views on anthropogenic global warming:

We know who the active denialists are — not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.

They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

“They broke the climate”. (Pretty impressive, actually: who knew that a few dissenting voices could wield such Godlike power?)

String ’em up!

Before he does anything rash, Mr Zwick might want to have a chat with James Lovelock, who now says that all that early hysteria might have been, well, a little overheated.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (8)

Get Rich Quick

April 22, 2012 – 8:27 pm

Nothing to it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Mightier Than The S-word

April 22, 2012 – 8:19 pm

Well, it appears that Marine le Pen will be the kingmaker in France this time around, having attracted fully a fifth of French voters to her National Front party in today’s election. This was nearly double the turnout for her opposite number on the Socialist far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Assuming that National Front supporters will more likely prefer Nicholas Sarkozy to today’s winner, the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, a numerical defeat for Sarkozy today (27.9% for Hollande, 26.7% Sarkozy with 75% of the vote counted) may still translate into a victory in July’s runoff.

MSM reporters seem shocked that the National Front did so well. I’m not.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (6)

Spring Break

April 21, 2012 – 10:25 pm

Sorry, haven’t had much to say since getting back, and it might be quiet here for a few more days. I need a little recess while I think about things.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Levon Helm, 1940-2012

April 19, 2012 – 3:58 pm

Anyone of a “certain age” will be saddened by the death of Levon Helm, who has succumbed to cancer at age 71. His rustic voice was a big part of the soundtrack of our youth, and it hurts to see it silenced.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Plenty of Room

April 19, 2012 – 12:09 am

Longtime readers will know that I’m a big admirer of Richard Feynman. In the nanotech discussions last week at SU, there was frequent mention of his visionary 1959 lecture There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, which is widely regarded as the genesis of the field.

If you aren’t familiar with it, you can read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

That Was Fun

April 17, 2012 – 5:07 pm

I’m back from my trip to Singularity University, and I’ll just say it was one of the more remarkable experiences I’ve ever had — something like a futurist’s boot-camp, in the company of a hundred or so very smart people. The days’ events began at about 8 a.m., typically didn’t let up until midnight or so, and consisted of a half-dozen or so lectures each day from global leaders in rapidly advancing areas of technology — AI, robotics, nanotech, genetics, biology, medicine, neuroscience, forecasting, computers and networking, and so on — interspersed with interactive workshops, group discussions, technology demos, and at the end of each day a gathering in the main building for people just to hang out and talk (lubricated with plenty of alcohol). The idea behind SU is to break apart the “silos” in these developing fields by assembling everyone in the same room and sort of banging their heads together. It’s a very good idea.

Because SU is in the heart of Silicon Valley, the idea that visionary entrepreneurship is the most effective way to get things done in this world is front and center throughout. The faculty are not people who talk about what folks are creating at the leading edge of all these fields: they are the people who are actually doing it — most of them, in addition to being academically prominent, are founders of edgy startups, or project leaders at places like Google — and you begin to feel that you are standing right at the growing tip of human endeavor. It’s intoxicating.

I’m still digesting it all, but I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say as the days go by. One thing I will say right now, though: over the past few years the tone of this blog has become increasingly dark, and increasingly centered on partisan politics and civilization’s decline, and that may change a bit. That isn’t to say that my opinions have changed about any of those topics — you certainly will not be seeing me issuing any calls for a bigger Federal government, or more Islamic immigration, or tighter gun laws, and God knows we still desperately need a regime change in November — but the content here will probably be a lot less likely just to swirl around and around in those gloomy vortices. That way madness lies, and I think I had begun to lose sight of that.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Service Notice

April 10, 2012 – 11:43 pm

I’ll be away for a few days: my friend Salim Ismail has invited me to participate in a program this week out at Singularity University, so I’ll be flying to San Francisco early Wednesday morning. I’ll be posting when I can — this looks like it’s going to be a fascinating experience — but the short programs at SU are high-intensity affairs that start early every morning and go far into the evening, so there won’t be much time for writing till I get back next week.

I know it’s been pretty dull here lately: there has been much to comment on, and a lot of it has to do with topics that are so highly charged that I’ve been wary, frankly, of wading in. I’ve been blogging here for seven years now, and need to reflect a bit on where it’s all led, and how exactly to move forward.

The world is changing very quickly now; its effective volume has shrunk very rapidly in the past few years, and so the pressure and temperature are increasing at an accelerating pace. There is some sort of phase transition on the way, I think, but whether any of what we know and love will survive it is terribly hard to say. It is clear, though, that the kettle is about to boil.

Singularity University is a hotbed of optimism about the future. I could use a dose of that, because I feel more like we are all sitting on a volcano, and the ground is starting to rise.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (12)

Fool On The Hill

April 10, 2012 – 10:36 am

Life is a risky business. To reach a comfortable dotage, one must thread one’s way past such omnipresent mortal hazards as cancer, auto wrecks, random assault, falling objects, air disasters, bullets stray or otherwise, atherosclerosis, capsizings, snakebite, cyclones, suicidal depression, carbon-monoxide leaks, cerebral haemorrhage, defenestration, shark attack, overdose, industrial accidents, poisoning, autoerotic asphyxiation, crib death, MRSA, jihad, pyroclastic flow, capital punishment, jealous lovers, anaphylactic shock, downed power-lines, avalanche, bicycle messengers, salmonella, icy sidewalks, derailings, surgical mishaps, rogue waves, heatstroke, cirrhosis, lightning, and so on.

This is a formidable gauntlet. With that in mind, it has always seemed to me that the game is sporting enough as we find it — but some of us find the challenge too modest, and so make hobbies of drag-racing, wreck-diving, free-climbing, hang-gliding, parkour, white-water rafting, and such like. Among the more jeopardous of these follies is “base jumping”, which consists of putting on a Rocket J. Squirrel suit and leaping from some crag or tall building. (None for me, thanks, but I’ll be sure to raise a glass at the wake.)

Here’s what it looks like.

Here’s what it looks like when it doesn’t go so well.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (3)

NATO’s Chickens: Home To Roost

April 8, 2012 – 10:46 pm

Armed with weapons purloined from Muammar Qaddafi’s arsenal, Tuareg fighters and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb give us what I think is referred to around Washington these days as a “teachable moment”.

Today’s lesson? The law of unintended consequences.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (1)

Whither The Buck?

April 6, 2012 – 10:44 pm
This entry is part 13 of 15 in the series Free Will

Sam Harris, the neuroscientist who made his bones as an anti-religious gadfly and member of the atheist “Four Horsemen” (now down, sadly, to three), has been writing and speaking lately about “free will”. The expression is rendered in scare-quotes because in Dr. Harris’s view “free will”, as generally imagined, is an illusion, and less: it is not even a coherent concept. I’m inclined to agree, as long as we leave in the part about “as generally imagined”.

Another of the “Four Horsemen” is the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who has written extensively on the subject of free will. His books Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves are expositions of compatibilism — the view that determinism is, despite our intuitions, compatible with responsible moral agency.

Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have walked a long way arm in arm, but have come to a fork in the road. For Dennett, the fact that it is only through us, as deliberators, that the causal network in which we are embedded can produce decisions and behavior means that our choices are still our responsibility. For Sam Harris, not so much.

The key idea, in Dennett’s words, is that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. In order to preserve responsibility, then, we need to draw a boundary around ourselves, as nexuses of deliberation, that is big enough for us to live inside. Because we must choose what to do whether we like it or not, and because our choices are crucially affected by the contents of our brains — which includes, among everything else, our beliefs about such things as our own moral agency and responsibility — then to make this boundary expansive enough to regard ourselves as being responsible for what happens inside it is the key to a realistic view of freedom and moral agency. We can’t be “free” in the full-blown, radically libertarian way we imagine when we think naively about “free will”: that concept, when examined closely, isn’t even coherent. But once we shed our muddled, imaginary version of “freedom”, we can see that what we do have, though, is just fine for our purposes. Our deliberations matter, and they are ours — as long as we make “us” big enough.

Sam Harris disagrees.

Here is a video of a talk by Dr. Harris, as well as a short essay inviting Daniel Dennett to a public discussion of their disagreements. (Our friend Kevin Kim discusses the video here.)

And here is a transcript of a lecture given by Daniel Dennett in December of 2010 on how neuroscientists like Dr. Harris are getting it wrong.

I’m not going to say much more here (see our other linked posts on free will below), but I do want to point out a weakness in Professor Dennett’s talk. He uses a colorful analogy:

A favored image, not because it is good, but because it nicely captures the intuition people have is this: you go to Disneyland and go on the jungle boat ride, and the captain makes a dramatic show of almost steering into one catastrophe after another. Oh, you just missed that big hippopotamus, and then the crocodile, and — close call! — you narrowly avoided the waterfall! But of course the boat’s helm is completely non-functional, since the boat is running on an underwater track. There was never any chance it was going to go off the rails and collide with anything. There was a delicious illusion that there were these opportunities for disasters, all of which were deftly prevented from happening by the quick work of your skilled captain. A lot of folks think that this is the true face of determinism. “If determinism is true, my whole life is sort of on these hidden railroad tracks, and I don’t actually have any free will at all!” But, in fact, there is a fundamental difference: the activities, the desires, the reflections of the helmsman, the captain on the jungle boat are causally inert; they are not playing a role in determining the trajectory. But when you make a decision, the reflections going through your mind are in fact playing a role. Which is just what you should want.

The weakness is that this is not a strong enough analogy; it doesn’t capture the real problem. Better would be to imagine that the rails under the boat aren’t steering the boat directly; instead they control the brain of the captain. That gets us a little closer to the heart of the matter.

Anyway, Dennett and Harris are heading for a lively debate, I think. Have a look at the linked items.

By Malcolm | Posted in Free Will | Comments (3)

Google Glasses

April 6, 2012 – 12:20 pm

So: here’s the latest inevitable step toward having our brains permanently jacked into the Internet.

Are you going to want a pair of these?

In this demo the user talks to his glasses. But what’s the endpoint here? Once the interface is fast and intuitive enough, so that we can send and receive data as thoughts, and we can connect our thoughts to everyone else’s (ten years from now? five?), what then? The hive mind of the Borg?

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

Man Is the Only Real Enemy We Have

April 5, 2012 – 9:38 pm

Here’s Eric Hoffer, writing in 1975:

After all that we have seen with our own eyes there ought not to be a grownup person who is not contemptuous of the gibberish about an ideal society and does not look for the lineaments of a commissar in the features of an idealist loudmouth.

The trouble is that the young who nowadays want to make history are not interested in history. They are unbelievably ignorant of much that has happened in this terrible century. They will follow anyone who wants to clear the ground for a new world by sweeping away all that exists.

– Before the Sabbath, p. 105

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (2)

Gloves Coming Off

April 3, 2012 – 10:18 pm

In case you’ve been shackled to a drainpipe for the past couple of weeks, there’s been an escalating tension in the air over the fate of Obamacare, now that the Supreme Court has heard the case.

President Obama, warning the other day that he would view a negative ruling by the Court as “judicial activism”, unburdened himself of a real whopper:

“Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden appearance.

This is absurd, of course; ruling on the Constitutionality of acts of Congress is what the Court does, and has been doing since Marbury v. Madison. One can only assume that Mr. Obama,. with his degree from Harvard Law, does know that — so one can only assume that he simply doesn’t care, and is trying to paint the impending smackdown he is likely to get from SCOTUS as motivated by right-wing politics, rather than Constitutional jurispridence. All of a sudden he’s worried that he’s actually going to lose, and is laying the groundwork to turn the visceral anger of his base against the Court’s conservative Justices.

It’s working already. I have a student, a lawyer in his fifties, who in class last night complained to me that anyone could see that it was all just political: because after all, the ones who were seen as most likely to rule against the individual mandate — Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas — are all Republicans.

This is poorly reasoned — confusing correlation with causation — but we’ll be hearing a lot more of it, I think.

Anyway, as I said, tensions are high, and getting higher. Here we are in an election year, with the country breaking apart over irreconcilable, axiomatic disagreements about what America is and what governments are for, and the President’s signature accomplishment — bitterly fought and narrowly won on a blood-soaked political battlefield — is in real danger of being nullified. So when Mr. Obama fired off his warning shot across the Judiciary’s bow on Monday, it provoked a warlike response from a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ordering the DOJ to report back by Thursday on whether the President actually believes that the Supreme Court has the power to strike down unconstitutional laws.

For the appeals court to make such a flamboyantly provocative gesture shows how high the temperature’s getting here. There’s often bad blood between the branches, but the smoldering feud between this administration and the conservative Justices is about as openly hostile as I’ve ever seen. (Remember the SOTU after the Citizens United ruling?)

Such high drama! and mighty entertaining — but the stakes are even higher.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (8)

Sign Me Up

April 3, 2012 – 6:02 pm

For one of these.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

Too Much Information

April 2, 2012 – 4:48 pm

Our friend David Duff posted an item today in which he quoted an article from James Bamford at Wired about a new U.S. data-storage facility:

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale [the site of the facility] is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,’ as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes””so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

This rang a very old bell: a short story that I’d read as a boy in a science-fiction anthology called 17 x Infinity, published in 1963. This prescient tale, MS fnd n a Lbry, was written by Hal Draper in 1961, and was in the form of a report, written far in the future by alien archaeologists, on the collapse of our civilization (always a hot topic, of course, here at waka waka waka). The cause? Well, it’s short enough that you might as well just go read it yourself.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (14)

Service Notice

April 1, 2012 – 11:59 am

No posting today: I’m heading off to Ephrata, PA, for the annual banquet and awards ceremony of the national quilter’s association I’ve been sewing with since my early twenties. (I’ve been quilting since I was a boy; I should post some photos of some of my work sometime.)

My latest piece, which expresses the deepening polarization of American society in a geometric arrangement of corduroy and gingham, has been nominated for Best Topical Quilt, and I’m hoping I might even have a shot at Quilt of the Year. So wish me luck!

Back tomorrow.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Run Like An Egyptian

March 31, 2012 – 10:36 pm

Oh, my. For a truly startling, completely unforeseeable turn of events, check out this item from the Times:

Islamist Group Breaks Pledge to Stay Out of Race in Egypt

CAIRO ”” The Muslim Brotherhood nominated its chief strategist and financier Khairat el-Shater on Saturday as its candidate to become Egypt’s first president since Hosni Mubarak, breaking a pledge not to seek the top office and a monopoly on power.

I’m sure you are as gobsmacked as I am. Why, the next thing you know, the sun will come up in the East.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (1)

Losing Our Way

March 31, 2012 – 5:15 pm

More nanny-state idiocy from the Feds. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Base And Apex: Which End Up?

March 30, 2012 – 3:10 pm

In the comment-thread of a recent post, I’ve been arguing with our resident gadfly The One Eyed Man about the Constitutional legitimacy of Obamacare’s individual mandate — part of a broader disagreement about the proper scope of Federal power.

After much back-and-forth I wrote:

Bottom line: Constitutional law is a fascinating study, combining history, literature, philosophy, logic, and even psychology. You and I can discuss it at any length we like, and it’s stimulating and interesting to do so, but ultimately what we decide here doesn’t really matter. We have our opinions, but the only opinion that carries any weight is the Court’s, and even that one looks to be fairly closely divided on this issue.

Supreme Court appointments matter. It’s one of the big reasons why the the next Presidential election matters so much.

I almost added the following, but thought I’d post it here instead:

Most of the bickering about these Constitutional-limitation issues is a matter not of Constitutional “truth”, but of temperament, and of axiomatic differences about the proper form and scope of government. To paraphrase G.C. Lichtenberg, the Constitution is like a mirror: if a Utopian looks in, you can’t expect a realist to look out.

The United States Federal Government is the largest and most complex apparatus of state power that has ever existed. It rules over hundreds of millions of people and the largest economy in history, and it wields military strength that dwarfs any other that the world has ever seen.

“That may be true,” you say, “but why bring it up?”

I bring it up because we individual citizens are small, and the bigger the Federal government is, the smaller we each become in relation to it. Actions of the Federal government must be broad enough in scope to apply with the same fairness and aptness to the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Texas, and Hawaii as they do to me. I am one voice in hundreds of millions, and my local concerns will compete with those of all those other, far-flung corners of the Union — places whose social, political, religious and economic contexts and concerns may differ from my own community’s in a thousand ways.

On the other hand, my state’s government is far smaller, and my county and municipal governments smaller still. Being so much smaller means that they can focus with much sharper resolution on the particular issues that confront their little subset of the nation’s geography and population — and that those citizens will far better able to make their voices heard above the din.

People will generally be happier, will have more control over the affairs of government that daily affect their lives, and will better able to create a shared public life as a community, the more that the mass of government power lies as closely to their local community as possible. After all, the central principle of our Republic is that power flows from the people upward, not from the Federal government downward. The apex of collective power in Washington should be the small end of the pyramid, not its base.

Moreover, in a Republic of semi-autonomous States, each becomes its own laboratory of innovation. Given that there are many ways to solve the myriad problems of governance, decentralization of power makes possible the exploration and comparison of different solutions, with every State free to adopt those that seem best suited to their local temperament, and to serve as an example to others.

If you want further justification for this view, then consider that men are fallible, and prone to the abuse of power. Wisdom then suggests that the less centralized and concentrated the power, the narrower will be the possible scope of its abuse — and the closer those entrusted with such power are to those to whom they are answerable, the warier they will be of the consequences.

These, then, are some of the reasons why we conservatives prefer the bridle to the spur when it comes to aggrandizations and consolidations of Federal power. I won’t attempt to articulate the opposing view, but comments are welcome, as always.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (2)

Whitewash

March 29, 2012 – 1:15 pm

In the past few days Heather Mac Donald has posted two essays on the jarring dissonance between mainstream coverage of race and violent crime and the underlying realities thereof. We hear all the time about the need for a “frank discussion of race in America”; perhaps this will help.

Read them here and here.

The comment-box is open.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Skinless And Boneless

March 29, 2012 – 10:36 am

Here’s a cogent item on the death of free speech in Britain, by Charles Cooke.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Volokh On Hypocrisy

March 28, 2012 – 1:09 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Vapor Of Record

March 28, 2012 – 12:09 pm

The New York Times opines today about yesterday’s Obamacare arguments in the Supreme Court. Predictably, the editors seem to believe that the effects of the Affordable Care Act are of sufficient national importance to trump its Constitutional audacity, and so they are willing to brush aside yesterday’s sharp questioning by conservative Justices as mere tendentiousness:

The insurance mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli ”” a comparison Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that cost onto others in the system.

Really? The point here is whether the individual mandate is as unique as the government would like the Court to think it is. But given that poor diets lead to poor health, and so to higher consumption of health-care services, why couldn’t the government, emboldened by a favorable ruling on the individual mandate, next make the case that failure to consume one’s vegetables increases the health-care cost burden on everyone else?

The point, as Justice Kennedy noted, is that to allow Washington this expansion of coercive power changes the relationship between the individual citizen and the federal government so profoundly, and is so conducive to further intrusive infringement of federal authority on individual liberty, that there is both an extraordinary burden of justification and a need for a clearly articulated limiting principle. It seems that the Solicitor General fell well short of both in yesterday’s arguments.

The argument by the Times seems to be: we want this, we need this, so the Court should just get out of the way. The editorial begins:

In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. (Gotta love that question-begging “well-founded”, too.)

Others might say that the “test” the Court faces is whether it will in fact do what it was created to do: recognize limits on the enumerated powers of the executive and legislative branches to usurp the rights of the States and of individual citizens.

We’ll have to wait and see; this could still go either way. But we can be a little more hopeful, I think, after yesterday’s session.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (5)

Our Day In Court

March 27, 2012 – 11:51 pm

It was a big day at SCOTUS, and long awaited: the Justices heard oral arguments about the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, and the buzz seems to be that it was rough sailing for the Solicitor General.

Transcript here. Decide for yourself.

Tomorrow: severability. If the mandate falls, does it take down the whole rotten structure? Judge Vinson thought so.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (37)

Any Questions?

March 27, 2012 – 10:44 pm

Here’s Richard Feynman explaining, with trademark clarity and simplicity, how science works. (Would that the video clip were as clear, but it’s worth watching anyway.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (1)