mcgees.org

Want to see almost real-time video of an eagles’ nest off the coast of California as it is alternately fed by Mom & Dad?  Go here for the eaglecam.

Linux users in X have it great.  Type mplayer http://media1.vcoe.org/eaglecam1 in a shell window, set the window that pops up as “always on top”, and just hang it somewhere on your screen(s).

Thanks, Amal!

“We get a lot of stiff skepticism and disbelief from our first time clients all the time, and its okay, we’re used to it.”

Yeah?  No kidding.  Add me to that list.

Anyone care to support, debunk, or otherwise comment on this “miracle” product?

Sorry for the late notice.  Go outside right now and look at the moon.  If you’re not in one of the “bad” areas, that is:

The idea of a renewable energy source like wind gets me really excited.  It’s clean, doesn’t pollute and is limitless.  — Kate Smolski, Greenpeace

I’m not the first, and I wont be the last, educated liberal with an axe to grind regarding Greenpeace.  When a group tries to position itself as a rational alternative, they need some basic concepts, such as information on manufacturing, physics, and weather systems.

It’s clean:  To use.  Mostly.  It will still probably need lubricants, paint, and so forth.  And the land for wind farms could be used for other things, such as, oh, growing food.

doesn’t pollute:  After it’s made!  But you don’t plant a seed and grow a wind turbine.  It’s heavy industry to build one, move one, and install one, and smelting, fiberglass construction, metalworking, trucking, and any other conceivable, related technology are all energy-intensive and polluting.

is limitless:  What are we talking about?  Magic?  The energy has to come from somewhere.  Saying “We can take as much energy out of the wind as we like with no side effects” is as daft as saying “We can put any amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere without side effects” or “There are an infinite amount of American Bison, it’s OK to shoot them from trains.”  Every joule taken out of the air changes weather patterns.  It slows down airflow, might easily have dramatic effects on microclimates, and maybe even the macro climate.  I don’t have the figures on this — anyone know of estimates of how many wind turbines it would take to cause significant climate change?

When arguing for new technologies, you are usually arguing that something is better.  Rarely is something perfect.  You could say that reading a book at night to the light of two LEDs is better than powering a whole CRT to watch TV (even if you’re watching Nova) — it has less impact on the planet.  But it’s not perfect.  Arguing that people in warm climates should scatter a few tomato seeds on the ground in the spring and basically ignore them, then harvest the crop, seems perfect, but those seeds take time and energy to process, prepare, package, and something-that-means-transport-that-starts-with-P.  So, again, it’s just better, not perfect.

If Greenpeace do not have the numbers, they need to find them.  Wind is going to be a stopgap at best.  I expect it would be an environmental catastrophe if 100% of the world’s energy were to be derived from wind power.  Wind is better than coal.  No doubt.  But what’s better than wind?  Fusion, for instance.  But that’s “nuclear”, so Greenpeace would probably fight against it, tooth and nail.

I received an email from my former Congressman (who still thinks I’m one of his constituents) today, with a tiny survey (push poll?) attached.  As a devotee of logic, I hate false dichotomies.  I hate them almost as much as I hate non-exhaustive multiple-choice surveys.

OK, the first one: Should Congress allow warrantless wiretaps of terrorism suspects, including American citizens?  Here are the options he gives:

* Yes, these actions are necessary to protect our security.
* No, these actions overstepped the law.
* Undecided.

Although a slightly leading question, there is ton left that wouldn’t be left if the answers were simply “Yes”, “No”, “It’s more complicated than that”, and “Undecided”.  It goes on to give reasons that are, I guess, supposed to be your reasons if you take that position.

What about?:

1.  These actions are necessary to protect our national security, but are illegal and should not be done
2.  These actions are necessary to protect our national security, are illegal, but should be done anyway
3.  Congress should outlaw it, but it should happen anyway and should not be a crime if the President authorizes it (I actually know a dipshit with this position.)
…and on, and on…

Next: Which of the following best describes your view on abortion?

* I strongly believe abortion should be legal for all women.
* There should be some limits on abortion; girls under 18 should need parental consent.
* Abortion should be illegal, except to save the life of the mother.
* Undecided.

What the hell?!?  The first and the second are not incompatible!  You can easily believe that all women should have access to abortion on demand, but that no girl should.  But what if you think there should some limits, but not this limit, or not only this limit?  Then the second and third become indistinguishable, because three suffers from the same problems: if some abortions are legal and some illegal, it’s a meaningless difference whether we consider the baseline to be legal with “some limits” or illegal with “some exceptions”.  What are we supposed to do, count up the cases and see which side wins?  This is ludicrous.  Note that many Christians would fall into the third camp, but might add “or in cases of rape and incest”.  What’s the Christian supposed to answer?  Undecided?  Hardly.

I know I’m preaching mostly to the choir here (my readers, or at least commentators, are, in general, much more astute than the average person), but there’s just one more question, and it’s so ludicrous that I cannot skip it, much as I want to: Which of the following best describes your views on the Middle East conflict?

* We should strongly support Israel.
* We should support Palestinians at least as much as we support Israel.
* We should just stay out of the conflict.
* Undecided.

Again, one and two are not incompatible, unless you’re supposed to read the subtext in the first as “We should strongly support Israel and strongly oppose the Palestinians.”  But if this was implied, where’s the “We should strongly support the Palestinians and strongly oppose Israel”?  Where’s “We should work through an international body, such as the UN, to decide the world’s collective position democratically”?  Where’s “Give everyone a year’s notice to move out, then nuke the fucking area back to a cindery Stone-Age nuclear hot zone so that these fucking morons stop squabbling over a few thousand hectares of barren rock”?  (I know, there are tons more options again, but you can write about them if you wish.  I’m done.)

And — AND — WORST OF ALL — there is no “Other” on any of these questions!  Fucking slimebag.  Is he saying that we have to bin our answers into one of his statements, otherwise it’s not a position worth having?

I’m sending this link to him.  If only he’d have the balls to post on this blog and back up his intentions, or at least instruct a staffer to do so.  Otherwise, he’s just a manipulative, logicless sonofabitch.

I used to research route planning.  I’ve never read the following rule formalized, so I thought I’d set it down.  The rule is:

When trying to get off a mountain, “Reverse the directions that got you there” is a better algorithm than “This road has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?”

I believe the rule has even greater validity in December.  In the Northern Hemisphere.  After a snow.  In the dark.  Jesus.

It’s nine minutes long, but go watch.  Go on.  Seriously.  Nine minutes, you can spare them.  This whole paragraph is a link.

You didn’t go, did you?  Here it is again.  At least give the guy his day in court.  You spend more time than this masturbating, and you know it.

OK, the easily cowed have watched the video.  Thoughts?  Anyone?

Oh wait! I have some!

Every four-square argument should give you pause.  It’s Pascal’s Wager, and that is a deeply, deeply flawed analysis.  But let’s not talk about Pascal yet.  Let’s talk about Global Warming.

I’m going to summarize, as I still don’t think you’ve watched the video.  He draws four squares, the quadrants of the “Global Warming is Real / Global Warming is Fake” and the “Do Something / Do Nothing” axes, and pretends to court worst-case scenarios in all four squares.  GW is fake and we do nothing?  Sanguine.  GW is true and we do something?  We’ve spent some money, but still sanguine.  GW is false and we do something?  Global Economic Depression.  GW true and we do nothing?  The End of the World.

OK, he didn’t actually say “The End of the World”, but that’s even more worst-case than he said, so we’ll leave it.

See?  Four squares.  Nine minutes.  Problem solved.  Wager yourself into salvation.  Pascal would be proud.

But his argument’s fallacious.  If we stagnate the economy to fix global warming, we’re going to end up with “Global Economic Depression”, whether or not GW is true.  If his four box analogy were an accurate tool, we would be wagering guaranteed Global Economic Depression against the risk that everything is going to be OK.  And … wait for it … Global Economic Depression, in the age of ICBMs, could cause the End of the Fucking World.

But his pretty squares hide problems just by their construction.  McGee’s First Law is “Everything is more complicated than it at first appears to be, even when McGee’s First Law is taken into account.”  Every time you see a dichotomy, a line in the sand, prepare to argue.  “You’re with us or you’re against us.”  “Something is alive or it isn’t.”  “Something is a person or it isn’t.”  “Global Warming is true or it isn’t.”  If, just for the sake of argument, GW is a nonzero but noninfinite threat, and we devote the entirety of our resources to it, we’ve overreacted, and we can actually cause the end of the world by trying to help.

But it gets better!  How fucked will we be if Global Warming is true but is already irreversible?  Then, if we choose “Column A” (the do something [everything] column), we are left with a fucked planet, but with no jobs, no food stockpiles, no medical stockpiles, no nuclear disarmament, no colonization of outer space, no nothing because we’ve spent every cent trying to stop Global Warming.

I’m a registered Green Party member.  And I want to save the Earth.  But I part company with dichotomizers, Earth-Firsters, and their ilk.  The time for debate is not over.  The time for debate is now.  There will not be a time when debate is unreasonable.  And I hate faulty logic.  I’d rather have a root canal.  It makes me want to scream, and drives my blood pressure through the roof.

We do need to try to save the Earth.  But we need to do so by preserving the Earth in the interim.  If we start putting infinite resources towards problems, we are guaranteeing our demise.  And next week, it might not be GW falling on our heads.  It could be AIDS.  Or influenza.  Or meteorites.  Or space monkeys.  Or, as Pascal would have it, God.  Ditch the boxes, ditch the dichotomies.  Plant a tree and bike to work.  Shut down coal plants.  We’ll turn this around.  We’ll just do it without playing four-square.

I just watched a TV special about a 9.2 Earthquake in the United States (twice the magnitude of the San Francisco quake) within my parents’ lifetimes.  How the hell have I never heard of this?  More here.

Over 10,000 aftershocks were recorded following the main shock. In the first day alone, eleven aftershocks were recorded with a magnitude greater than 6.0. An additional nine more occurred over the next three weeks. It was not until eighteen months later that the aftershocks were no longer a danger.

Some portions of earth moved 400 meters (!!).

In the past six months, exactly, I have received exactly 160,928 pieces of spam in my inbox.  If every one of those had come in the mail, in addition to all the dead trees, I would have kilos and kilos of stamps to sell off as a “mission mix”.  A pretty nice one, with Russian and Chinese and Nigerian stamps in there.

But of course spammers don’t pay for their mailings, instead making you pay for their mailings.  That’s why they exist, and that’s why they are scum.

We need an efficient micropayments scheme in the world.  A way in which we can give fractions of cents to people.  We could have wireless agents and web agents do the negotiation for us.  Set your phone so that if a beggar asks for money, it automatically gives them a nickel without showing up on your radar at all (this is a plot element of the sci-fi novel I’m writing.)  We could, instead of challenge-response, just charge people a tenth or twentieth of a cent to email each of us.  Nobody legitimate would notice (you’d have to send 2000 emails a month to have it cost you a buck) but it would stop the spammers dead in their tracks.

There’s more, but I’ll save it for the novel.

Hmmm.  Amazon: 92% reassuring, 8% not at all reassuring.

Jenn and I had just switched places, Jenn replacing me under Niall’s nylon pup-tent shaped like a locomotive.  Niall was the other occupant.  Jenn is claustrophobic.

“I’m kind of freaking out in here,” Jenn says to me.

“Why?” Niall overhears.

“Your mommy doesn’t like closed spaces.  Your daddy does.”  A pause.  “When daddy goes cave exploring, do you want to go with him?”

He looks at me and regards me carefully for fully ten seconds.  He doesn’t want to disappoint me.  “Ummm.  Ummm.  There might be bears.  I’m not sure if I want to go.”

Jenn and I exchange startled looks.

“That’s true,” she says.  “Sometimes bears do live in caves.”

Suddenly he’s not sure if we’re pulling his leg or not.

“Silly!” he accuses.  “Bears aren’t real!”

“Oh, yes, they’re quite real,” Jenn explains.  “In the sense that they are actual animals living on the planet.”

“Yes, bears aren’t monsters, they are real animals,” I elaborate.

A puzzled look.  “Why?”

I think about that for a second.  It’s a really good question.  Why are bears real?  Not, “Why did they evolve?” but “Why did humans allow carnivorous, predatory, terrestrial megafauna to survive into the 21st century?”  A fitting question for Jared Diamond.  Were bears just too ferocious, too tenacious, or too remote, maybe?

I’m hoping this post will help web surfers.  If you’re looking for a caustic solution to dissolve paper, cardboard, and ink of all tested varieties, mix cat urine and diet cola in roughly equal quantities, and immerse.

This research was underwritten by the Amazon.com VISA card, which provided Thank You For Arguing and Color for Philosophers to my nightstand, and I was ably aided by assistants Mika (our poorly-housebroken cat) and Sebastian (our clumsy cat).

For several years, I have had a primary, private intellectual guiding principle.  I have called it Joshua’s First Law.  It goes as follows: “Everything is more complicated than it first appears.”  Or, with a nod to Hofstadter’s Law, “Everything is more complicated than it first appears, even when Joshua’s First Law is taken into account.”  And I’ve sometimes attached the revision, known as Joshua’s First Anti-Corrolary, which reads “Except when it isn’t.”  But never have I seen this expressed by another.  Until I read a version of it on MJD’s Blog.  He wrote, “Advice to people wishing to become smarter: Get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine.”  Kudos to him.

Zxaxgr is right.  There is something wrong with our eyes.  Interesting article on yellow as a perceptual problem.  I’ll note that near the top of my reading list is Hardin’s Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow, and I’m looking forward to it.

“You’re thirty years late to this party, George, so it pretty clear that the only reason you’re showing up now is because somebody paid you to attend.”

The Star Tribune published a filler piece by a reporter who informally surveyed scientists to ask for one science question that every high school grad should be able to answer.  Mark Dominus then tore it apart.  Really good response.  (via Adam Fields, via Kottke)

Gene for rare disease that turns muscles, tendons, and ligaments into bone found.  The disorder traps people within an exoskeleton, with bone locking the joints.  (via dwarf)

Study Explains Evolution’s Molecular Advance: “Thus, it turned out that the receptor for aldosterone existed before aldosterone. Aldosterone is found just in land animals, which appeared tens of millions of years later.

‘It had a different function and was exploited to take part in a new complex system when the hormone came on the scene,’ Dr. Thornton said.”

Japanese firms divest themselves of whaling interests.

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for….  Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

The Wine Info Site.  Learn about your grape varietals.  They don’t have much info about Aghiorgitiko.

Wow, I’m glad I kept reading The Blank Slate.  The last two chapters, “The Arts” and “The Voice of the Species” were really, really, really good.  Maybe borrow the book and just read those?

I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion.  I’ve kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.

Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:

A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual’s body.

Now, hold on.  That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter’s definition of vivid imagination.  By this definition, brain death is not a disorder.  Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease.  They’re not causing suffering, right?  At least not unless you expand suffering to something like “eventual diminution of lifespan”, or “elimination of the potential for experience of happiness”. But maybe his argument doesn’t rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:

But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it’s usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it’s the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment.  (Emphasis added)

I’m not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That’s not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research.  The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.

(Magic post)

I went to the Ravnica prerelease today and had a blast.  Got some nice cards, too.

At the table where we were constructing and playtesting our decks, I played a game against a EE major from Cal Poly SLO. I was using a card with a mechanic called Dredge, which has, as a cost, putting cards from your library into your graveyard. One time when I used the ability, I lost the one card from my deck that could have won me the game against him.

“That’s why Dredge is dangerous,” he said.  “You can lose your best cards.”

An aerospace engineer, another technical person, and I all chimed in to disagree. We contended that it was just as likely that worthless cards would be put into our graveyard, giving us access to our better cards.

The technical person to my left said “I consider the top card of my library at all times to be the superposition of all the cards in my library until drawn,” and grinned.

“But then you open up your deck box and your cat is dead,” I countered.

The engineer exclaimed “What’s this dead cat doing in here?!”  And we all laughed.

“We’re nerds,” I said.

I opened a corked bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape this evening. This time it was an inexpensive wine, but last time it was a $135 vintage Jaboulet Hermitage.

From wineanorak.com: “A slightly dangerous response is that in old world wine countries there is less emphasis on product quality and greater tolerance of what could be considered wine faults by consumers and even the wine trade. The fact that the wine industry trades heavily on tradition may imbue it with a degree of inertia, and thus a significant change such as changing closure type is perceived as more problematic than a 5% taint rate.” This from a very interesting article on screwcap closures.

“The mutant phenotype that we saw when we crossed the two deletions … was an inability of [fruitfly] larvae to carry out vigorous, concerted head swinging to scrape their way out of the egg shell…” So they named the gene “amontillado”.  And a mutation causing learning defects is named “turnip”, because “vegetables are not well-known for their mental acuity.”

Missed prognostication, as promised: No earthquake occurred.

“[Phoebe] may be our first encounter with a Kuiper belt object.”

For the mathematically inclined reader, we note that a Calabi-Yau manifold is a complex Kähler manifold with vanishing first Chern class.

Egads.  I thought I was a mathematically inclined reader.

You have almost certainly seen the late-nineteenth century motion study work of Eadweard Muybridge before, even if you did not know what it was. There’s a great online exhibit.