I missed this late yesterday in Slate, but it is priceless. Among other things, Lithwick shows that Cuccinelli's investigation holds no benefit for Virginia taxpayers:
...State Sen. Donald McEachin estimates that the Cuccinelli lawsuit will cost Virginia taxpayers between $250,000 and $500,000 if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Spending half a million dollars of taxpayer funds to possibly recover some part of half a million dollars of misspent grant money doesn't even begin to make sense. But it's not just Mann on the hook here. "With a weapon like this in Cuccinelli's hands, any faculty member at a public university in Virginia has got to be thinking twice about doing politically controversial research or communicating with other scholars about it," says Rachel Levinson, senior counsel with the American Association of University Professors. UVA environmental science professor Howard Epstein, a former colleague of Mann's, puts it this way: "Who is going to want to be on our faculty when they realize Virginia is the state where the A.G. investigates climate scientists?" If researchers are really afraid to do cutting-edge research in Virginia, the state's flagship university is in enormous trouble.
Well, yeah. But is UVA standing up for itself and ...
In “Operation Blue Rage,” Sea Shepherd Activists Will Target Tuna Poachers | 80beats
The media-savvy eco-pirates of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have a new target in their sights: commercial fishing boats that illegally scoop endangered bluefin tuna out of the sea.
The Sea Shepherd activists have become famous for harassing Japanese whaling ships; a reality TV show about their exploits documented the many tricks the activists used to slow down the whalers, including shooting stink bombs onto their ships and attempting to disable their propellers. With their new project, dubbed Operation Blue Rage, the activists hope to bring the same level of attention to the fight to save endangered tuna.
Stocks of bluefin tuna have fallen by roughly 85% since the industrial fishing era began…. Yet despite quotas that are arguably too high to begin with, quotas are still being ignored in many places [Ecopolitology].
Conservationists suffered a major setback this spring, when an international meeting failed to pass new protections for the bluefin tuna, which is highly valued by sushi chefs. In light of this political inaction, Sea Shepherd decided to act. Its flagship, the Steve Irwin, is now en route to the Mediterranean to begin a harassment campaign against ships that are illegally pulling the endangered fish from the sea.
Steve Irwin First Officer Locky Maclean acknowledges that it will be somewhat difficult to find tuna poachers among those fishing boats that comply with the lax laws, but says there are a few tricks the activists can use.
First, the legal season for bluefin tuna is just 30-days. “Where we come into play, where we can operate and enforce, is on vessels fishing outside that season, after the June 15th cutoff or before the May 15th start date. If we come across vessels purse seining outside of that time frame…we’re in a position to enforce [the law].” Second, there is the ICCAT list of vessels, “enables us to know the names of the vessels which cannot fish in that area” [Treehugger].
Related Content:
80beats: Is the Anti-Whaling Activist Who Boarded a Japanese Whaling Ship a Pirate?
80beats: Videos Show Collision Between Japanese Whaling Ship & Protesters
80beats: Bluefin Tuna Is Still on the Menu: Trade Ban Fails at International Summit
80beats: Scientists Say Ban Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Trade–and Sushi Chefs Shudder
Image: Wikimedia
A thousand trillion suns | Bad Astronomy
What does it look like to stare into infinity? Like this:
Oh yes, you need to click that to see it in its glory. Because there’s a lesson here…
When you look up at night, you might see a thousand stars. With binoculars, you might see tens of thousands. With a decent telescope, that number goes up to a seemingly amazing tens of millions.
This one image shows tens of thousands of trillions of stars. A million stars for every man, woman, and child on Earth, with more to spare. And it’s only one small part of the sky.
The stars are contained in thousands of galaxies, each so far away that their might and power is reduced to a smudge. Some are big enough to reveal some structure, a pretty splash of a spiral or a delicate swirl, but most are so distant they are mere points of light.
The image is dominated by Abell 315, a cluster of galaxies located two billion light years away. It’s a sprawling city of galaxies, hundreds of island universes bound by their mutual gravity. If each has 100 billion stars — a fair guess — then there are trillions of stars visible here in a glance… and that’s dwarfed, crushed, by the other galaxies scattered in this cosmic portrait.
The picture was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Incredibly, this picture is the combination of only about 2.5 hours’ worth of exposures! There are a handful of individual stars in the image; they are located in the foreground, in our own galaxy. They might be a few hundred or even a few thousand light years away. Everything else in the picture is millions or billions of light years away.
… or, almost everything. See those colored streaks, the red, green, and blue lines? Those are asteroids, rocks a couple of kilometers across. They have different colors because this image is a composite of three separate exposures using a red, green, and blue filter. During each exposure, the asteroids moved a bit compared to the background stars and galaxies due to the combined motion of the rocks and the Earth, leaving streaks. The color of the streak corresponds to the filter used in the exposure.
Assuming these are main belt asteroids, they are perhaps 100 – 200 million kilometers away. Our space probes take months or years to get that far from Earth, yet these are the nearest objects by far in this picture! The most distant galaxy you can find in this image is something like 100,000,000,000,000 times farther away.
Every now and again, as does everyone, I find myself consumed with the drama in my life. Personal interactions, local troubles, global issues. These are all important, sometimes even crucial. But when I can, I try to remember to leverage myself out, to try to gain some perspective.
Gazing into the depths of space, plummeting into the environs of a hundred quadrillion suns… that’s where true perspective can be found.
Credit: ESO/J. Dietrich
Evolution in Action: Roundup Ready Crops Create Roundup-Resistant Superweeds | 80beats
Is the Roundup Ready revolution coming to a close? In the early 1990s, agribusiness giant Monsanto introduced its line of genetically modified crops that could tolerate the pesticide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray it far and wide without worrying about damaging their product.
Now, reports are bubbling up about the increased resistance some weeds are showing to Roundup, which could be the source of great worry, as 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of corn currently grown in the United States are the Roundup Ready varieties.
[F]armers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said [The New York Times].
And for the environmentally-minded, here’s something else to consider:
That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors [The New York Times].
For an in-depth take, and a historical reminder of how weeds have always evolved to thwart our means of killing them, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s post.
Related Content:
The Loom: How To Make a Superweed
80beats: Biotech Potato Wins European Approval; May Signal a Larger Shift on GM Crops
80beats: India Says No to Genetically Modified Eggplants
80beats: GM Corn and Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Facts
80beats: Bee Killer Still at Large; New Evidence Makes Pesticides a Prime Suspect
DISCOVER: “Frankenfoods” That Could Feed the World
Image: flickr / Peter Blanchard
I’m on National TV Across Australia Right Now… | The Intersection
...apparently. A viewer sends this picture. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is airing a talk I gave in March at the National Press Club in Canberra, as the keynote address for the Science Meets Parliament annual event hosted by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies. The talk, composed in a burst of inspiration on the flight across the Pacific, is one I've never given before or since--but I'm kinda proud of it. I am going to see if it will be available in any watchable format stateside, and then I may say some more about the subject matter.
Genetic variation among African Americans | Gene Expression
There’s new paper in Genome Biology (tip: Dienekes) which doesn’t present too much in terms of new results, Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans, but has really, really, good visualization of the data:
Results
From cluster analysis, we found that all the African Americans are admixed in their African components of ancestry, with the majority contributions being from West and West-Central Africa, and only modest variation in these African-ancestry proportions among individuals. Furthermore, by principal components analysis, we found little evidence of genetic structure within the African component of ancestry in African Americans.Conclusions
These results are consistent with historic mating patterns among African Americans that are largely uncorrelated to African ancestral origins, and they cast doubt on the general utility of mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers alone to delineate the full African ancestry of African Americans. Our results also indicate that the genetic architecture of African Americans is distinct from that of Africans, and that the greatest source of potential genetic stratification bias in case-control studies of African Americans derives from the proportion of European ancestry.
I want to emphasize the part about lack of utility of uniparental markers. These were the first markers which became widely used in scientific genealogy, and African Americans made a great deal of recourse to these so as to identify the tribe from which their ancestors came. There are obvious historical reasons why this would have more valence for this group than for others, as their ancestral identity was consciously erased during the period of slavery.
But even though generating trees of mtDNA or Y markers is more tractable using a coalescent model, and it gives you a clean answer, it’s only a tiny slice of your ancestry. And not necessarily a representative one. Perhaps better than nothing 10 years ago, but in the days of 450 K SNP chips probably outdated. As I said above I think the paper is interesting mostly because the graphical representation is really good. Most of the time I add labels, but this figure needs no additional explanatory editing!
The blue represents European ancestry in individual African Americans, and in the text they note that the frappe bar plot nearly perfectly aligns with the distribution on the PCA plot. Remember that the two axes on the PCA plot represent the two largest axes of variation, with the first component (largest) on the x, and the second component (second largest) on the y. The largest component naturally separates Europeans from the African groups, while the second largest component separates the various African groups. The difference between the two Pygmy groups is not surprising, the Biaka have been found to be much more admixed with their Bantu neighbors than the Mbuti. I wouldn’t put too much weight in the closeness of the San and Mbuti on the plot, because you’re seeing only a two-dimensional view of the total genomic variation, the two largest dimensions as evaluated by looking at the total range of variation of genes among the set of individuals (European, African American and African) within the data set. The relationships may differ if you constrain the sample space of genetic variation to African genotypes only, and other dimensions may also indicate different relationships.
Here are the estimates of ancestral quanta for African Americans by region against different potential ancestral groups. They had 136 African Americans, so I wouldn’t put too much weight on the interregional differences.
22% of the ancestry of African Americans in the sample is European, with a standard deviation of 12%. It seems that around 10% of the African American population is more than half European in ancestry. Interestingly, in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Faces of America, all three of the people with black ancestry, two of whom clearly identified as African American, were more than 50% European in ancestry.* When it comes to African ancestry the affinity with the region of the west of the Bight of Benin seems clear if you view the data through a more granular lens.
The Mandenka are from the western fringe of West Africa, while the Bantu are a linguistic group which seems to have emerged just to the east of Nigeria, and swept east and south with the spread of a particular agricultural lifestyle until pushed up against the Nilotic and Khoisan groups of East and South Africa respectively. But this is on the population level. Could it be that individuals exhibit variance by African region, as they do on European ancestry? Not too much (at least beyond a level of noise, and perhaps a few outliers).
The two figures below are based on African genotypes within the African American population.
Note the contrast with the linear topology evident when European ancestry is added into the mix. Verbally what is clear is that while some African Americans have more European ancestry than others, on an individual level very few are reasonably identified as Yoruba people, or Mandenka people. Rather, individual African Americans exhibit a mix of African lineages in proportion to the various weights of sources in the slave trade.
Why might this be? I have observed before that the vast majority of the ancestry of African Americans is likely colonial. Though a few African American communities, such as the Gullah of coastal South Carolina, preserve distinctive regional African folkways, by and large black Americans as a culture are American, and derive many of their distinctive aspects from elaborations on Anglo norms or a novel synthesis of African ones (in particular, it seems clear that black Americans have been strongly influenced by the two Southern British settler folkways in their speech and religion). The deep history of African Americans within this country means that a great deal of time has elapsed whereby people of Yoruba, Mandenka or Kongo ancestry could have intermarried. Without positive assortative mating by tribe the various ancestral quanta would have become intermixed in subsequent generations. The Gullah exception supports this model, because they lived in relative isolation from whites. The rice agriculture which they practiced required less direct supervision than cotton or tobacco to extract economic productivity, and the South Carolina coastal country was notoriously unhealthful for whites. The relatively humane nature of rice agriculture as opposed to cotton (and especially sugar) also manifested in the more stable family life of the ancestors of the Gullah. So the relationship between white planters and Africans in this region was closer to that between lord and serf than owner and property, and the ancestors of the Gullah could develop their culture in America more organically than African Americans elsewhere.
In contrast, white ancestry does exhibit a great deal of individual variation. Why? There are two obvious ones that jump out. First, much of the ancestry may be much more recent. Recent ancestry has less time to be “dispersed” across the population through intermarriage. Though certainly whites and blacks mixed genetically in the colonial era, the process continued uninterrupted down to emancipation, while the addition of new African ancestry ceased in near totality by 1810 (there was some trade in slavery which reached the United States of America after this period, but not much), and had greatly diminished in the decades before 1810. The endogenous population growth of the black American community was sufficient to provide slaves for the new cotton lands of the early 19th century. After 1865 white-black relations were more surreptitious but continued nonetheless (e.g., Malcolm X’s mother’s father was white). Second, there is naturally the reality that there was, assortative mating for European features (e.g., “good hair”, skin lighter than “a brown paper bag”) among the African American elite. Though ancestry and phenotype can become decoupled, this takes time, and as I suggest above much of the European ancestry is recent. The image above is of a black American Congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. I assume most readers are aware that W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” were disproportionately what in other societies would be recognized as people of mixed-race, but who in the United States were classed within the general black population because of the white Southern paradigm of hypodescent.
Overall, nothing too new in the paper, but really great charts!
Citation: Zakharia F, Basu A, Absher D, Assimes TL, Go AS, Hlatky MA, Iribarren C, Knowles JW, Li J, Narasimhan B, Sidney S, Southwick A, Myers RM, Quertermous T, Risch N, & Tang H (2009). Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans. Genome biology, 10 (12) PMID: 20025784
* Gates is more than 50% European, while Elizabeth Wright is 65% European in ancestry. This aligns with intuition based on physical appearance. Malcolm Gladwell, who may not identify as African American (his father was a white Englishman, his mother a mixed-race Jamaican, and he is a Canadian immigrant), is likely to be ~75% European, though the number was not noted in the special.
Image Credit: Library of Congress
I’m Telling the Truth, Your Honor. Just Look at This Brain Scan! | Discoblog
As neuroscientists refine their techniques for imaging the brain, scans like the fMRI keep creeping toward the courtroom and getting closer to joining to polygraph tests as means to sort liars from truth-tellers through physiology. In Brooklyn, lawyer David Levin is now offering the fMRI brain scan of a witness as proof of her honesty. If the court accepts it, it could be the first time such a brain scan was ever admitted as evidence. For what would be a legal breakthrough, the case is a rather minor one: Levin's client, Cynette Wilson, claims she was treated poorly at her job at a staffing center after filing a sexual harassment complaint. The lawyer found a coworker of Wilson's to corroborate her story, but wanted to bolster his credibility. Wired.com reports:
So, Levin had the coworker undergo an fMRI brain scan by the company Cephos, which claims to provide “independent, scientific validation that someone is telling the truth.”
Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects (.pdf) with ...
How to Turn a Salad Spinner Into a Medical Centrifuge for $30 | Discoblog
The necessary parts: one salad spinner, some hair combs, a yogurt container, plastic lids, and a glue gun. The finished product: a manual, push-pump centrifuge that could be a lifesaver in developing world medical clinics. Its name: the Sally Centrifuge.
A team of college students invented this low-cost centrifuge, which can be built for about $30, as a project for a global health class at Rice University. The teacher challenged them to build an inexpensive, portable tool that could diagnose anemia without access to electricity, and the tinkerers got to work.
The students, Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis, found that spinning tiny tubes of blood in the device for 10 minutes was enough to separate the blood into heavier red blood cells and lighter plasma. Then they used a gauge to measure the hematocrit, the ratio of red blood cells to the total volume. That information tells a doctor whether a patient is anemic, which can in turn help to diagnose conditions like malnutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria.
In a press release, Rice University listed some of the advantages of the Sally Centrifuge:
It requires no electricity - just a bit of muscle. "We've pumped it for 20 minutes with no problem," Theis said. ...
Welcome to Scott Horowitz’s Parallel Universe
"A Trajectory to Nowhere" by Scott "Doc" Horowitz
"The current debate has nothing to do with technical/programmatic issues, it is completely politically motivated and being driven by a few people in the current administration, e.g., Lori Garver, NASA Deputy Administrator, Jim Kohlenberger, Office of Science and Technology Policy Chief of Staff, and Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the Office of Management and Budget. Their objective is to cancel the "Bush" program and punish the states (Alabama, Texas) that "didn't vote for us anyway".
Keith's note: Of course, Scott Horowitz, who certainly seems to enjoy the breeze of that revolving door, is utterly hypocriticial when it comes to deriding decisions as being "political" in Washington DC (ohmygosh, politics in Washington. I wonder who knew this was going on!?) given that he is still a registered lobbyist for ATK (paid $30K in 2008 and 2009, and $10K thus far in 2010), and has been interacting with NASA in that capacity. Does he bother to disclose this when he posts these little one-sided missives? Of course not. Pot, kettle, black, Scott.
Meanwhile, back in our universe ...
Constellation Program Cost and Schedule Will Remain Uncertain Until a Sound Business Case Is Established, GAO, August 2009
"The Constellation program has not yet developed all of the elements of a sound business case needed to justify entry into implementation. Progress has been made; however, technical and design challenges are still significant and until they are resolved NASA will not be able to reliably estimate the time and money needed to execute the program. In addition, cost issues and a poorly phased funding plan continue to hamper the program. Consequently, NASA is changing the acquisition strategy for the Orion project as the agency attempts to increase confidence in its ability to meet a March 2015 first crewed launch. However, technical design and other challenges facing the program are not likely to be overcome in time to meet the 2015 date, even with changes to scope and requirements."
NEEMO 14 and Social Media Policy at NASA
Keith's note: NASA civil servant Nick Skytland is one of the Education and Public Outreach Officers for NEEMO-14. He is overtly using his Twitter account for the performance of his official duties - yet he still blocks specific taxpayers from following his postings. I have to wonder when NASA CIO Linda Cureton will finally put a social media policy in place at NASA that deals with such flagrant abuses of one's position as a NASA employee.
Explosion and Injuries at Redstone Arsenal
2 severely burned in Redstone Arsenal explosion, WALB
"Emergency management officials said two people were injured in an explosion at Redstone Arsenal. A Redstone spokesperson said it happened at 8:45 Wednesday morning at Aviation Missile Research Development and Engineering Center test area 10."
2 severely burned in Redstone Arsenal explosion, WAFF
"One responder said the area where the explosion happened is a heavy demolition site. They have been testing there for days. They are still not sure what went wrong. One HEMSI paramedic described the scene as "horrific."
Kosmas and Hutchison Tag Team on Space Policy
How space exploration helps us on Earth
"The international space station's research capabilities are now available after years of construction and $100 billion of investment. It offers opportunities to conduct research in an environment unavailable on Earth and it must be sustained, but not just for the sake of science. One problem in the president's proposal is that it does not address the risk to the station that will result from retiring the space shuttle and canceling the Constellation replacement program at the same time. A healthy and viable space station is critical to the emergence of the commercial space industry that the president's proposal relies on. If the space station is lost, the primary reason to send humans into space in the next decade will be lost."
Bipartisanship key for the future of space program
"While we are encouraged the president showed a willingness to make some changes to his proposal for NASA during his visit to Florida, members of Congress from both parties still have concerns. These concerns include the readiness of the commercial space industry to fill the role the president envisions, and how to minimize the risk to the International Space Station, which after more than a decade of construction and $100 billion in investment is about to realize its full research potential."
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Joins the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce that the Southwest Research Institute, which recently committed funding to fly researcher-astronauts and their payloads onboard commercial suborbital spacecraft, has joined the Federation as an Executive Member, having received unanimous approval by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s Board of Directors.
Dr. S. Alan Stern, Associate Vice President at SwRI, former top science official at NASA, and chair of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG), stated, “We are strong believers in the power of commercial, next-generation vehicles to advance science and education. We also expect tremendous advances from the newly emerging capability to put scientists in space with their experiments. The CSF is leading the way in this industry, and SwRI is excited to join the CSF and play a strong role in the exciting new era of 21st century space research aboard commercial space flight vehicles.”
Southwest Research Institute is an independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization, with more than 3,200 staff who specialize in the creation and transfer of technology in engineering and the physical sciences.
Mark Sirangelo, Chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, commented, “On behalf of the member companies of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, we are proud to welcome Southwest Research Institute as an Executive Member. Dr. Stern has done a tremendous job in pushing forward the nascent field of commercial suborbital science. We look forward to continue working with SwRI to further CSF’s goals of promoting the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursuing ever higher levels of safety, and sharing best practices and expertise throughout the industry.”
Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, added, “SwRI has a strong reputation and outstanding technical expertise in flying science payloads in space, including on suborbital rockets, and in the next few years SwRI expects to create some of the first suborbital scientist-astronauts in the nation as Dr. Stern and his colleagues train and fly onboard commercial suborbital spacecraft.”
About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high-tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202.349.1121.
About the Southwest Research Institute
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is an independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization. The staff of more than 3,200 specializes in the creation and transfer of technology in engineering and the physical sciences. The Institute occupies more than 1,200 acres in San Antonio, Texas, and provides nearly 2 million square feet of laboratories, test facilities, workshops and offices, with satellite offices in locations such as Boulder, Colorado. For more information please visit http://www.swri.edu or contact Alan Stern at alan@boulder.swri.edu or at 720.240.0163.
# # #
Why isn’t Verizon selling Zune Pass with Kin? – CNET
 CNET | Why isn't Verizon selling Zune Pass with Kin? CNET But there is no way she is going to shell out an extra $30/month just to upload pictures to the "cloud." Why would anyone buy this phone when they can get a ... Kin Two (Verizon Wireless)CNET |
Five reasons why Stephen Hawking—and everyone else—is wrong about alien threats
Stephen Hawking is arguing that humanity may be putting itself in mortal peril by actively trying to contact aliens (an approach that is referred to as Active SETI). I’ve got five reasons why he is wrong.
Hawking has said that, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
He’s basically arguing that extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs), once alerted to our presence, may swoop in and indiscriminately take what they need from us—and possibly destroy us in the process; David Brin paraphrased Hawking’s argument by saying, “All living creatures inherently use resources to the limits of their ability, inventing new aims, desires and ambitions to suit their next level of power. If they wanted to use our solar system, for some super project, our complaints would be like an ant colony protesting the laying of a parking lot.”
It’s best to keep quiet, goes the thinking, lest we attract any undesirable alien elements.
A number of others have since chimed in and offered their two cents, writers like Robin Hanson,Julian Savulescu, and Paul Davies, along with Brin and many more. But what amazes me is thateveryone is getting it wrong.
Here’s the deal, people:
1. If aliens wanted to find us, they would have done so already
First, the Fermi Paradox reminds us that the Galaxy could have been colonized many times over by now. We’re late for the show.
Second, let’s stop for a moment and think about the nature of a civilization that has the capacity for interstellar travel. We’re talking about a civ that has (1) survived a technological Singularity event, (2) is in the possession of molecular-assembling nanotechnology andradically advanced artificial intelligence, and (3) has made the transition from biological to digital substrate (space-faring civs will not be biological—and spare me your antiquated Ring World scenarios).
Now that I’ve painted this picture for you, and under the assumption that ETIs are proactively searching for potentially dangerous or exploitable civilizations, what could possibly prevent them from finding us? Assuming this is important to them, their communications and telescopic technologies would likely be off the scale.Bracewell probes would likely pepper the Galaxy. And Hubble bubble limitations aside, they could use various spectroscopic and other techniques to identify not just life bearing planets, but civilization bearing planets (i.e. looking for specific post-industrial chemical compounds in the atmosphere, such as elevated levels of carbon dioxide).
Moreover, whether we like it or not, we have been ‘shouting out to the cosmos’ for quite some time now. Ever since the first radio signal beamed its way out into space we have made our presence known to anyone caring to listen to us within a radius of about 80 light years.
The cat’s out of the bag, folks.
2. If ETIs wanted to destroy us, they would have done so by now
I’ve already written about this and I suggest you read my article, “If aliens wanted to they would have destroyed us by now.”
But I’ll give you one example. Keeping the extreme age of the Galaxy in mind, and knowing that every single solar system in the Galaxy could have been seeded many times over by now with various types of self-replicating probes, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a civilization hell-bent on looking out for threats could have planted a dormant berserker probe in our solar system. Such a probe would be waiting to be activated by a radio signal, an indication that a potentially dangerous pre-Singularity intelligence now resides in the ‘hood.
In other words, we should have been destroyed the moment our first radio signal made its way through the solar system.
But because we’re still here, and because we’re on the verge of graduating to post-Singularity status, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be destroyed by an ETI. Either that or they’re waiting to see what kind of post-Singularity type emerges from human civilization. They may still choose to snuff us out the moment they’re not satisfied with whatever it is they see.
Regardless, our communication efforts, whether active or passive, will have no bearing on the outcome.
3. If aliens wanted our solar system’s resources, they would haven taken them by now
Again, given that we’re talking about a space-faring post-Singularity intelligence, it’s ridiculous to suggest that we have anything of material value for a civilization of this type. They only thing I can think of is the entire planet itself which they could convert into computronium (Jupiter brain)—but even that’s a stretch; we’re just a speck of dust.
If anything, they may want to tap into our sun’s energy output (e.g., they could build a Dyson Sphere or Matrioshka brain) or convert our gas giants into massive supercomputers.
It’s important to keep in mind that the only resource a post-Singularity machine intelligence could possibly want is one that furthers their ability to perform megascale levels of computation.
And it’s worth noting that, once again, our efforts to make contact will have no influence on this scenario. If they want our stuff they’ll just take it.
4. Human civilization has absolutely nothing to offer a post-Singularity intelligence
But what if it’s not our resources they want? Perhaps we have something of a technological or cultural nature that’s appealing.
Well, what could that possibly be? Hmm, think, think think….
What would a civilization that can crunch 10^42 operations per second want from us wily and resourceful humans….
Hmm, I’m thinking it’s iPads? Yeah, iPads. That must be it. Or possibly yogurt.
5. Extrapolating biological tendencies to a post-Singularity intelligence is asinine
There’s another argument out there that suggests we can’t know the behavior or motivational tendencies of ETI’s, therefore we need to tread very carefully. Fair enough. But where this argument goes too far is in the suggestion that advanced civs act in accordance to their biological ancestry.
For examples, humans may actually be nice relative to other civs who, instead of evolving from benign apes, evolved from nasty insects or predatory lizards.
I’m astounded by this argument. Developmental trends in human history have not been driven by atavistic psychological tendencies, but rather by such things as technological advancements, resource scarcity, economics, politics and many other factors. Yes, human psychology has undeniably played a role in our transition from jungle-dweller to civilizational species (traits like inquisitiveness and empathy), but those are low-level factors that ultimately take a back seat to the emergent realities of technological, demographic, economic and politico-societal development.
Moreover, advanced civilizations likely converge around specific survivalist fitness peaks that result in the homogenization of intelligence; there won’t be a lot of wiggle room in the space of all possible survivable post-Singularity modes. In other words, an insectoid post-Singularity SAI or singleton will almost certainly be identical to one derived from ape lineage.
Therefore, attempts to extrapolate ‘human nature’ or ‘ETI nature’ to the mind of its respective post-Singularity descendant is equally problematic. The psychology or goal structure of an SAI will be of a profoundly different quality than that of a biological mind that evolved through the processes of natural selection. While we may wish to impose certain values and tendencies onto an SAI, there’s no guarantee that a ‘mind’ of that capacity will retain even a semblance of its biological nature.
So there you have it.
Transmit messages into the cosmos. Or don’t. It doesn’t really matter because in all likelihood no one’s listening and no one really cares. And if I’m wrong, it still doesn’t matter—ETIs will find us and treat us according to their will.
Latest on Oil Spill Movement
This animation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was created using actual overflight information and forecast models from the NOAA and Unified Command.
The red dot is the location of the Deepwater Horizon oil well, which exploded on April 20, releasing oil into the Gulf near the Louisiana coast that has yet to be contained. Eleven rig workers are missing and are presumed to have died in the explosion.
The animation begins April 22, the day the first image of the spill via flyover was released.
From Nola.com “A containment boom staged at the Breton National Wildlife Refuge Thursday. The spill, a slick more than 130 miles long and 70 miles wide, threatens hundreds of species of wildlife, including birds, dolphins and the fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs that make the Gulf Coast one of the nation’s most abundant sources of seafood.”
I found a page of great resources. The news changes on this every hour, so here is a list where you can find the latest information.
Thanks to Mary McCurnin of Firedog Lake. She writes:
We are all the Oil Industry and we need to take responsibility for changing our lives now.
Here are links for May2, 2010 to news, wildlife rescue, state and federal sites, volunteer sites and others. I will update them as the information becomes available. Any information or links are appreciated. Thanks to everyone who provided links. Please keep them coming. There is some overlap between the catagories.
Today is was harder to find specific information. Seems that organizations are overwhelmed or out in the field.
News Updates:
Skytruth
Time Picayune New Orleans Daily Newspaper
NOLA.com
http://www.pnj.com Pensacola FL
http://www.sunherald.com Biloxi/Gulfport MS
http://www.al.com/press-register/ Mobile AL
Reuters
New York Times
MSNBC
Links to Volunteer or Work:
Basic Safety and Health Training will be held at The Mary C. in Ocean Springs, MS at 9:00, 10:00, 4:00, and 5:00. No reservations are required, just show up. Volunteers doing outdoor work with BP are required to undergo a 20-minute health and safety training course.
Links to Help Rescue Wildlife:
Oiled Wildlife Care Network Blog-U.C. Davis This is information from the front lines in LA.
Tri State Bird Rescue and Research
IBRRC International Bird Rescue Research Center
Facebook/Louisiana Dept of Wildlife and Fisheries
California Department of Fish and Game, Office of Spill Prevention and Response
Wildlife Health Center, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
Discovery News
(Nothing about the oil spill at all on the Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia department of wildlife and fisheries websites or facebook pages.)
Federal, State, Information, Fact, Sites:
Deepwater Horzon Incident Site
NOAA
NOAA Environmental Modeling Center
Environmental Economics Blog
Environmental and Urban Economics Blog
Twitter Oil Spill
EPA
Others:
British Petroleum Site (cringe)
BP Had Other Leaky Problems Leading to Gulf Spill
BP, We Have a Problem . . . .
Something occurred to me today: why is a British company allowed to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico where any spill would impact American coastline — not, obviously, British coastline? No environmental ramifications for the home country of the oil giant whatsoever.
Two Stories From ProPublica address the latest oil catastrophe.
BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill in the Gulf of Mexico that will soon make landfall, is no stranger to major accidents.
In fact, the company has found itself at the center of several of the nation’s worst oil and gas–related disasters in the last five years.
In March 2005, a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others. Investigators later determined that the company had ignored its own protocols on operating the tower, which was filled with gasoline, and that a warning system had been disabled.
The company pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and was fined more than $50 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Almost a year after the refinery explosion, technicians discovered that some 4,800 barrels of oil had spread into the Alaskan snow through a tiny hole in the company’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. BP had been warned [1] to check the pipeline in 2002, but hadn’t, according to a report in Fortune. When it did inspect it, four years later, it found that a six-mile length of pipeline was corroded. The company temporarily shut down its operations in Prudhoe Bay, causing one of the largest disruptions in U.S. oil supply in recent history.
BP faced $12 million in fines for a misdemeanor violation of the federal Water Pollution Control Act. A congressional committee determined that BP had ignored opportunities to prevent the spill and that “draconian” cost-saving measures had led to shortcuts in its operation.
Other problems followed. There were more spills in Alaska. And BP was charged with manipulating the market price of propane. In that case, it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice and agreed to pay more than $300 million in fines.
At each step along the way, the company’s executives were contrite.”
Read more at ProPublica.
Now, BP is using chemicals to disperse the oil that might also have a bad environmental impact themselves.
“The chemicals BP is now relying on to break up the steady flow of leaking oil from deep below the Gulf of Mexico could create a new set of environmental problems.
Even if the materials, called dispersants, are effective, BP has already bought up more than a third of the world’s supply. If the leak from 5,000 feet beneath the surface continues for weeks, or months, that stockpile could run out.
On Thursday BP began using the chemical compounds to dissolve the crude oil, both on the surface and deep below, [...]
How Bad is the ‘Mother of All Gushers’ aka The Oil Leak?
How long will our mainstream media play politics with our climate and our ability to live on this planet? The New York Times is sedating its readers. MSNBC is sedating its audience too. They all are. We have seen this before — the mainstream media exists to make money by entertaining us and selling advertising. That is their purpose. They do this by keeping people in a state of curiosity and interest, but don’t necessarily give us factual information. The way they do that is to placate us when things seem too scary, or scare us when things seem too placid. Confuse us when things seem clear. Distract us with dumb interviews or outrageous speculations, like the ones above. They create controversy to keep everyone interested, by presenting more than one side of a situation that doesn’t have more than one side. They do that by presenting arguments that say misleading and false things. We know what is causing climate change, for example, and it’s mainly caused by man’s activities — but that’s an inconvenient fact that the media would rather ignore. They would rather have people argue about the cause and even whether climate change exists, even after well-established science has arrived at a conclusion over 20 years ago. There is little controversy in facts, and controversy is what keeps the uneducated people tuning in. Unfortunately this approach is keeping people in the U.S. ignorant and we are falling behind other countries in every aspect of renewable energy.
Glenn Beck, Rush, FOX News commentators, columnists in large newspapers, and other nuts are supposing that President Obama planned the oil rig explosion in order to destroy the coal industry, or maybe the oil industry. It’s complete nonsense to imagine that someone caused this oil rig explosion on purpose. Oil rig workers have been talking about the cause of this explosion but few people are listening, but it’s so much more fun to think this was done on purpose. You can hear an oil rig explosion survivor on the most recent Climate Files podcast describe exactly what happened. Of course it wasn’t done on purpose. See “Heckofajob Brownie” on Chris Matthews’ show yesterday (above), for the most paranoid in the latest right-wing nutso theories.
The media in the U.S. does not seem to care that we know how bad the oil leak in the Gulf is. They talk about fixing it, as if that is even possible. They don’t talk about how damaging to the environment this is. They would rather we blame it all on politics, and ponder that this might have been something Democrats or Obama did. It’s absolutely ridiculous how our media is treating this oil leak. There is no excuse for deliberately interviewing idiots like the man above on a national cable news show. (If I see the know-nothing Sarah Palin [...]
‘Mendini > Depero’ opens in Rovereto (May 7)
Mendini > Depero
May 8 – October 17, 2010
*Vernissage May 7 at 5pm
Casa d’Arte Futurista Depero (Rovereto)
Curated by Gabriella Belli and Nicoletta Boschiero
Various Whiteboards on Solid State Medical Operations
This was from when I tried to “prove” to Steve that “you can’t just write stuff on scraps of paper.”
Basically, the conclusion of this conversation was (as Steve will attest), “your egghead airforce crap is all ‘lazers and shit,’ but here on the ground I have a wall of bodies here beating down the door and every dumbshit chuck-a-chuck two bits to an NPI is gunning down every open phone line to get me to sign something or read something and then refuses to pay me and meanwhile I have two infant children and people in the hospital, so get this fucking billing out. I can’t just type this into a computer, patients hate that, and I’m dying here.” But as you can see from previous posts, Steve and I have mutually made some progress.
Basically: I’ll trust you that this shit works… if you trust me to give me the shit that actually works now.
This was “why you can’t just throw a nurse at it.” There was another board where I showed that every staff member you add that isn’t a provider themselves adds overhead downstream of the actual event which accumulates exponentially per unit medical provided. The idea here was that it greatly mattered in medicine how easy it was to enter the data into the iPhone because there was an inflection point where technology just required too much attention and the doctor has to revert to paper, and that if you can’t reliably overcome that activation energy of attention, then all your computer systems are worthless.
Haha, this was from when I taught Steve binary; I think because he asked something about “why 128 ASCII characters?” or something like that, so I made him figure it out over the course of the day. This was also a bad day; I remember some real estate agent had tried to sell Steve a “great unfinished property in an upcoming neighborhood” in the cold rain, and over subsequent lunch with the agent at Greenwich Hospital, I told the agent to his face that his property was a “knock down piece of shit” and then listed the construction and neighborhood flaws I had noticed, and then I scolded him for wasting my time. So this hotshot thirty something blueshirt is sitting there while some kid in a t-shirt deconstructs his entire psyche over salads. This agent now tries to avoid me —for some reason— when he tries to pitch Steve other real estate opportunities.
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My goal is to build a “solid state” medical office. The idea is that if everything in “one unit doctor” can be represented by a graph of [web addresses] (emails, HTTP requests, ICD, CPT, and medical keyword addressing), and that this “one unit doctor” itself operates at a profit independently, that one could then continue to add doctors to the system without incurring the overhead which currently keeps medicine local while “solving medicine” as we currently know it via graph analysis.
This is hard to do in practice.
I’m posting some of my ideas because frankly: I need more help because I’m tapped on activation energy running both the office and my personal life which, as a preview, here’s how I spent today:
- Woke up in a hotel to “engineering” demanding to know from behind me door if “my floor is damp.” Why am I in a hotel? Yes. Is my floor damp? Not that I noticed, but considering that yesterday the problem was “the fire alarms keep going off because ‘they’re drawing too much power in the conference room’, this was an improvement. I bet you that this hotel costs more per day than a mortgage for a house.
- Waited for an hour to get expensive salad. Tried to connect to Internet.
- Waited for an hour to get a car pickup.
- While in the hotel lobby waiting for said car, had to track down the contact information for a patient on my iPhone internet, call several times from three different phones while in the hotel lobby trying to get past the patient’s family’s screen of “telephone calls are always solicitors and debit collectors”, and inform irate “member of the family who handles persistant phone calls” that the patient had an INR of [GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM, NOW] to “GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM, NOW.”
- Car took me to other side of town to car rental agency, car agency refused to rent me a car without a credit card because a debit card is not acceptable by “Connecticut law?” The girl at the desk at this dank car depot wanted me to produce paystubs and home utility bills “like, from the Internet or something.” I told her no. Car drove me back to hotel.
- Called another car, $20 cab ride to office; it is now 3pm.
- Started doing work, but then an elderly patient wandered into the office because I forgot to lock the door and I scheduled an appointment for her and talked with her about “life.”
- Locked door.
- Wrote these posts.
So yah, could use a little help… and unless you’re into the unemployed-if-not-now-then-soon mortgage derivative finance blueshirt scene… not really much of a culture here in Connecticut that doesn’t make you want to go all Tyler Durtin all the time.
In software, I’m currently writing authenticated robots to navigate insurer websites for Google App Engine. (I’ll share my code so far at Google I/O for anybody into Python Google App Engine.) This is hard because insurance is not in the business of telling you how to bill them for money. Also, this is hard because of the organic profitability of incompetence and a culture of “typing is for secretaries.” This is also hard because I can’t effectively do data entry and write software to do the data entry at the same time from the back of a cab.
