Yesterday, a judge ruled that California’s Proposition 8 — which banned same sex marriage — is unconstitutional. He’s quite correct.
If you think letting gay people marry is somehow a threat to your marriage, you’re quite wrong.
Do yourself a favor: go look at these pictures. They may bother you, or even disgust you. But do you know what they show? People in love.
And who are we to say they cannot express that love? I’ll tell you who: nobody.
Yesterday at Techonomy–before the fun started–we heard from Stewart Brand, famed founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and author most recently of Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. With his latest book, Brand is pioneering a new brand of environmentalism that discards some of the movement’s anti-technology habits, and reacquaints the green impulse with an openness to innovations that may be the key to solving our biggest problem—climate change.
According to Brand, environmentalism has a “legacy resistance” to nuclear power, and to transgenic crops or GMOs. In other words, the resistance isn’t really based on strong evidence of dangers, so much as an instinctive distrust of certain types of meddling with “nature.”…READ ON.
Yesterday, Google announced on their official blog that they’re pulling the plug on Google Wave–an emailing, instant messaging, and picture-sharing progeny, that allowed users to communicate real-time to share documents, videos, and what they had for lunch. If you haven’t heard of Google Wave, first announced last May, you’re not alone. That’s one reason Urs Hölzle, Google Senior Vice President for Operations, cites for the Wave’s demise:
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. [Google]
But why didn’t more folks ride the Wave? We’ve gathered some opinions.
Reason: It Wasn’t Forced on Us
Google Buzz–a more instant-message-like version of Wave that allows users to share where they’re browsing–seems to be doing well, reportedly having tens of millions of users. Some say that’s because Buzz just appeared as a kind of a growth on Gmail, and some “users” don’t even know they’re using.
It’s hard to say how many of those people are in fact unwittingly signed into Buzz, which Google stealthily slotted into Gmail at the start of this year without first testing it as a separate product. But bolting Buzz directly onto Gmail was always going to give the Web2.0 tool a head start in terms of usage, no matter how many complaints from privacy watchdogs that stacked up in the process. [The Register]
Reason: It Was Before Its Time
Combining all that functionality, may have confused users more comfortable with different software for different purposes:
Although many in the technology industry had long believed Google Wave was underperforming, the news that Google was ending support for one of its most innovative new products came as a surprise to most. “Maybe it was just ahead of its time, or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly,” said Michael Arrington, editor of influential industry website TechCrunch. [The Telegraph]
Reason: It Was Too Late
Maybe the functionality was just redundant. Sure Google Wave could allow character by character communication in real time, but Wave’s immediacy wasn’t enough to lure users away from already successful and very similar collaboration tools, some already in the Google line, such as Gmail for email, Gchat for messaging, and Google Docs for collaboration.
Sure, Wave let you collaborate with several people at once on documents, share photos with multiple recipients, and it created a searchable, editable stream of pure information. But there are already a raft of tools to do these things–it’s easy enough to use Google Docs to collaborate on documents, there are plenty of photo sharing services users are already invested in, and the search and chat tools inside Gmail are well above par. Wave just seemed a bit too crowded with information–it was e-mail, chat, media sharing and document editing all rolled into one (admittedly busy) interface–and the fucntionality too redundant. [Wired]
Reason: It Was Just One Step
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in comments to reporters at this week’s Techonomy conference that instead of a stand-alone tool, Wave’s advances might fit better as part of another Google program. PC World questions if we might see echoes of Wave in Google’s rumored Facebook competitor: Google Me.
“We liked the (user interface) and we liked a lot of the new features in it (but) didn’t get enough traction, so we are taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced. We’ll get the benefit of Google Wave but it won’t be as a separate product.”[CNET]
Related content:
80beats: Scientists Use Google Earth to Spot a Meteor Crater in Egypt
80beats: Google Exposes a Cyber Attack on Vietnamese Activists
80beats: Google Buzz: The Search Giant’s Attempt at a Facebook-Killer
80beats: Google TV Is Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You
It’s becoming increasingly clear that global warming may trigger many changes beyond the obvious change in temperature. Earlier this year I wrote about how rising carbon dioxide is driving down the pH of the oceans, with some potentially devastating consequences. Today in Yale Environment 360 I look at a potential change that’s also starting to get scientists very worried: a drop in the oxygen dissolved in the world’s oceans. Check it out.
[Image: Christopher Sebela on Flickr]
In many of the sci-fi futures that we know and love, racism, sexism, and homophobia are often scrubbed out of existence. Caprica/BSG, Star Trek, Torchwood, Mass Effect, even less thoughtful fare like Starship Troopers, depict residents of the future who are less interested in the permutations of human identity and more interested in the qualities of a person’s mind and spirit. Even Futurama’s “Proposition Infinity,” concerning the fake-contentious “robosexual marriage” controversy, spoofs this tendency.
Yesterday, US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker helped us move the rights needle a little further toward that future. In a heavily disputed decision, Walker overturned the barbarous Proposition 8 on the grounds it was unconstitutional under California law. His ruling was unequivocal and exhaustive: same-sex marriage is and should be equal to opposite-sex marriage. No doubt the case will move to the Supreme Court, where Obama and Congress’ collective feet-dragging on DOMA and DADT will finally be confronted. Until then, same-sex marriage is forbidden in most states in the USA and, regardless of the Supreme Court decision, will remain so in most countries in the world.
What is astounding is that for all the value we place in “human rights,” we are very good at not giving rights to humans. As I mentioned in my “Yes, We Should Clone Neanderthals” post, we regularly restrict human rights in those who are mentally un- or under-developed. Many who argued for the rights of Neanderthals based their arguments on the fact that the Neanderthal is “mostly human” or has very similar DNA and biology to a human being. While I agree the Neanderthal clone should have the same rights as a human being, I agree for a reason entirely other than biology. Rights have nothing to do with being human.
Our species’ history is and remains one largely built around the ever extending circle of those who have “rights” and what “rights” they have. Pick any great expansion in the rights of humanity, from the advent of democracy to the Nineteenth Amendment to yesterday’s decision, and I doubt you will find DNA at the philosophical core of the change. So what is it? When we, the human civilization, recognize the rights of those who have been oppressed or ignored, what is it we are recognizing? Their humanity! you may answer. But what does that mean? Surely a baby and a corpse are as human as an adult Homo sapiens is, but only the adult can vote. Why?
In a word: personhood.
This realization gets to a central tenet of the philosophy of transhumanism: that rights are not derived from being human but from being a person. Consider the shows listed above, particularly Mass Effect and Star Trek, and ask if Worf or Liara or Data have “human rights.” Of course they don’t. But they do have rights. The rights are derived from their being sentient, sapient beings capable of autonomous, reflexive, symbolic, ethical, and willful thought. That is, they are persons — and persons have rights.
The brilliance of personhood as a foundation for rights is that it exists independent of biology, even of physical substrate. You already know about personhood because you’ve seen it in your favorite movies. The Iron Giant, District 9, Blade Runner, A.L.F., E.T., Monsters Inc. and Ratatouille are about personhood. The eponymous hero of The Iron Giant demonstrates his personhood by willfully not being a gun and saving the day; Remy does so less on a smaller scale but no less movingly in Ratatouille by cooking a gourmet meal that triggers a Proustian flashback in Paris’ toughest food critic. Personhood is what you discover when you stop trying to figure out what makes humans human and instead try to understand how we recognize another sentient mind. A mind imbued with rights.
Personhood is, as simply as I can put it, the degree to which an entity exhibits a combination of aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as sentience, creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality. One great way to look at the question comes from Steven Wise’s Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, in which he argues that would-be persons can be ranked from “stimulus-response machines” at 0.0 up through fully functioning, rational adult humans at 1.0. The critical note here is that humans themselves can be placed on the scale, with a blastocyst ranking at 0.0 and 5-year-old somewhere in the range of 0.8. An example of a creature that may benefit from this personhood scale would be the former student of Irene Pepperberg, Alex, an especially bright grey parrot, who would fall above the 0.7 intelligence threshold for “limited personhood.”
If an artificial intelligence system or “uplifted” animal (e.g., Dug from Up!) were capable of achieving the same level of reason and mature reflection as an adult human, then it would be granted the same rights as an adult human. If you were to chart degrees of personhood against degrees of rights, it might look like this example taken from James Hughes’ Citizen Cyborg:
The reason all of this matters is that human beings have never been granted rights because they are merely human. Rights come from a demonstration not of DNA or taxonomy, but of mental and moral ability. The reason Judge Walker’s decision is not only correct now, but will be vindicated by history, is that it recognizes the right of two consenting persons to marry. If we did bring a Neanderthal back, his or her rights would be founded not in the similarity to human DNA but in the rational and moral mind, the personhood, that the clone would have.
The battle for the right of same-sex couples to be married is, in the extremely long view, a fight for recognition as persons. Whether aliens, robots, uplifted animals, or cloned Neanderthals will be the first non-humans to demand rights, I don’t know; however, I do know that it is not a matter of if, but when. I just hope by then we have moved beyond mere human rights.
- Image via Wikipedia
The Cassini probe is orbiting Saturn, taking devastatingly beautiful pictures all the time. But sometimes one comes along, and while at first glance it looks like just another routine shot, when you look more closely you realizing you’re gazing into awesomeness.
This picture [click to enjovianate] looks like just another shot of the edge of the planet, doesn’t it? You can see the layering of the atmosphere, which is cool, but it’s otherwise unremarkable. But wait! What’s that weird double blip above the horizon?
That’s Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun!
How freaking cool is that? Cassini was about 530,000 km (330,000 miles) from Saturn when it took this shot, but those two stars were 80 million times farther away!
That picture is no accident. One thing scientists like to do is watch bright stars go behind the planet Saturn itself. As the planet’s atmosphere dims and eventually blocks the star’s light, astronomers can determine all sorts of things about Saturn’s air: its composition, distribution and density with height, and much more… so they tracked the famous duo as they passed behind the planet itself.
I had the privilege of seeing Alpha Centauri two years ago this month, on my trip to the Galapagos. It was an amazing experience. I had read about that star system all my life, but to actually see it, to have photons that traveled all that distance fall into my eyes, be interpreted by my brain directly… well. It was very touching, and to me, very poetic.
I feel the same way to see this image, too, even though those photons weren’t seen by me directly. But they were detected by our robotic proxy orbiting the solar system’s most beautiful planet a billion kilometers away. And that may seem like a distance most terrible and remote, but it’s practically a warm hug compared to the emptiness that lies between us and this nearest, yet still so forbiddingly distant, star system.
Tip o’ the Zefram Cochrane to Gavin O’Brien. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
"The Senate today approved bipartisan legislation championed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, to safeguard America's human spaceflight capabilities while balancing commercial space investment with a robust mission for NASA. The bill is also supported by Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Senators Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), David Vitter (R-La.) and George LeMieux (R-Fla.)."
Bill challenges NASA to evolve, mind budget, Bill Nelson and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Orlando Sentinel
"Still, our legislation would reduce the time we would have to depend on Russia for access to the space station by extending the shuttle for another year. It would thus keep in place much of the talent at the Kennedy and Johnson space centers. Our legislation would push NASA's development of a new heavy-lift rocket forward, with the goal to fly by 2016. And it would make a significantly higher investment in commercial space ventures, specifically by accelerating development of both commercial cargo and crew carriers. Our congressional initiative also would keep the space station and its immense research opportunities going through at least 2020."
Keith's note: GSFC PAO has taken to bragging a bit. This little gem is posted at the bottom of some photo captions on their Flickr account: "NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe."
Is this accurate? I'm not exactly certain that it is. The words they use are not exactly defined i.e. "organization". Perhaps GSFC PAO could provide the statistics upon which they make this claim.
Desert RATS 2010: NASA and Challenger Center Hardware Interface Tests (photos)
"Two power interface tests were conducted today at NASA JSC between the GSW7000 solar/wind generator system and NASA's Habitat Development Unit (HDU) and Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV). The SEV and the HDU, along with the GSW7000 will all participate in the Desert RATS 2010 activities later this month and into September."
NASA Desert RATS 2010: Challenger Center Hardware Arrives at JSC (photos), earlier post
"[The NASA system that we reviewed for this audit] is a core system used to process, store, and distribute vital Agency intellectual property, such as [. . .], and crucial program and project information. [The reviewed system] is categorized as a "high-impact system" under Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Publication 199, "Standards for Security Categorization of Federal Information and Information Systems," February 2004. As such, a compromise of security controls1 for a high-impact system could result in severe adverse impact, leading to degradation in or loss of NASA's mission capability, harm to individuals, or life-threatening injuries. In October 20[XX], NASA awarded a 4-year contract to [a contractor] for, among other things, operation of [the reviewed system]."
Keith's note: I can certainly understand redacting information that would compromise national security. But this report is often incomprehensible due to the huge number of redactions. Simply redacting the entire report would have made more sense. Plus, if there really was a concern about keeping the contractor/system from being identified, why give hints as to when the contract being discussed was awarded? If I really wanted to take the time I could go back and look at NASA press releases from the month of October between 2000 and 2009 and search back through one of more easily accessible websites for NASA contract awards as well.
NASA Moves Space Station Repair Spacewalk To Saturday
"The first of two spacewalks by NASA astronauts to replace a failed ammonia pump on the International Space Station has been moved to Saturday, Aug. 7. A second spacewalk is planned for Wednesday, Aug. 11, to complete the repairs. Teams of flight controllers, engineers, and spacewalk experts have made significant progress in preparing for the first spacewalk, but need an additional day to get ready. The additional time allows for final procedures to be sent late Thursday to the station, giving the crew a full day to review the plans developed by Mission Control. Managers also moved the second spacewalk to Wednesday to give the crew more time to rest and prepare."
Down to the Wire for Station Repair Spacewalks, CBS
"NASA astronauts and engineers are refining plans for two spacewalks by astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson to replace a large ammonia pump module that shut down Saturday, knocking out one of the International Space Station's two cooling loops. The astronauts hope to carry out the first spacewalk Friday morning, starting at 6:55 a.m. EDT, and a second excursion Monday to finish the job, one of the so-called "big 14" on a list of critical components that require spacewalk repair if problems crop up. NASA managers initially targeted Thursday for the first spacewalk and Sunday for the second, but decided late Monday they needed more time to review procedures."
International Space Station Repair Spacewalk Planned for Friday
"NASA has decided to wait until Friday to conduct a spacewalk to replace a failed ammonia pump module on the International Space Station. Mission managers, program managers, flight controllers, engineers, astronauts and spacewalk experts made the decision Monday evening after continuing to analyze and refine engineering requirements, and reviewing the results of an underwater practice session."
Keith's note: Word has it that Mark Geyer has decided to cut the Constellation Flight Test Office budget by 75%. This is the same group that recently completed the very successful Pad Abort 1 (PA-1) launch. The remaining budget will only be enough to mothball equipment and facilities. The majority of the team is located at DFRC but the program is managed at JSC.
Secretary Of Commerce Meets With NASA Workers, WFTV
"The U.S. Secretary of Commerce met with soon-to-be laid off employees Wednesday at the Kennedy Space Center before he had to report to President Obama. The meeting is about finding the best way to spend $40 million meant to help laid off shuttle employees. The money won't be enough to help all the workers who will lose their jobs. The Secretary of Commerce wouldn't say exactly how he is going to propose using the money, but he hinted it could be used as business incubators."
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke tours KSC labs, pledges support, Florida Today
"Locke suggested the money would likely strive to attract or expand technology and alternative energy businesses, promote research and partnerships with higher education institutions, and finance ideas proposed by local economic development leaders."
From The Engineer - News:
Patent applications for satellite-based technologies have doubled in the last five years, according to patent and trademark attorney Withers & Rogers. Based on the company's analysis of the incidence of international patent filings relating to global na
From IEEE Spectrum:
The race to replace copper wiring with optics in chip-to-chip communications reached a new milestone last week as Intel announced it had produced a system using silicon-based photonics to transmit data between printed circuit boards at 50 gigabits per second.
This week's image:
Be sure to vote for your favorite caption!
Photo taken July 28, 2010, just off the Gulf coast of Grand Bayou near Barataria Bay. They were taken shortly after cleanup authorities announced major surface oil had been cleaned up.
BP announced that the well had reached a static condition, a ‘significant milestone’, and it was able to stop pumping mud into the well.
Yesterday we got that great news. They continue to cement it shut today, and we can only hope it holds and doesn’t leak from below as they finish the relief wells. We have also gotten news that most of the oil is gone, the dispersants aren’t really very toxic, and dispersants mixed with oil are no more toxic than oil. That would be good news too, if only it were true. Crude oil is horribly toxic and causes cancer, so it’s not saying much about dispersants to say that mixing them with oil makes them no more toxic than something that is extremely toxic. We have also gotten the improbable news that about 75% of the oil has magically disappeared.
Many reports from regular people and trained scientists, not government or media people, are coming in saying that the oil has not disappeared. The dispersants and the oil have killed hundreds if not thousands of animals, and dead wildlife carcasses are being destroyed, and we are far from being out of the woods yet with fish safety.
Read this excellent article at NRDC:
“Several fishermen involved in BP’s cleanup operation have told me that crews who’ve spotted oil on the water and have tried to skim it up but were waived off by BP and told to evacuate the area. They say BP then flew in dispersant planes to spray it so it sank.
“They’re just trying to hide it,” said one cleanup worker. “Then they’ll leave us with nothing to fish.”’
Dispersants just sink the oil. Photo from NRDC.
Read the interviews after the break.
DemocracyNow interviewed Environmental activist Jerry Cope.
Cope has spent the last few weeks traveling along the Gulf Coast and experiencing firsthand the contamination in the air and water. In an article being published onHuffington Post, Cope argues that instead of celebrating the allegedly vanishing oil, we should be concerned about the disappearance of marine life in the Gulf. He describes the Gulf as a “kill zone” and looks into where the marine animals have gone, given that BP has reported a relatively low number of dead animals from the spill.
Also interviewed was Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry expert, says that BP’s “Missing Oil” has actually turned up in St. Mary’s Parish, LA. That the animal carcasses are disappearing is absolutely not normal. Rikki Ott, marine toxicologist from the Exxon Valdez spill, said that all the animal carcasses from that spill were kept under lock and key until the lawsuits were completely. In this case, BP, (or the government), is destroying the evidence. The interview is below, in abbreviated form, so [...]
Scientists can detect the movements of single molecules by using fluorescent tags or by pulling them in delicate force measurements, but only for a few minutes. A new technique by Rice University researchers will allow them to track single molecules without modifying them -- and it works over longer timescales.
Development of a new porous, biodegradable nanocompound support for the regeneration of bone tissue.
The metal tin lacks the value and prestige of gold, silver, and platinum - but to nuclear physicists, tin is magic. Physicists recently reported studies on tin that add knowledge to a concept known as magic numbers while perhaps helping scientists to explain how heavy elements are made in exploding stars.
