In general, people haven't had the expectation of privacy from family and/or executors after death. If you become incapacitated, you can lose privacy even before death, i.e. an overall power of attorney, or financial guardianships / conservatorships. (If you have elderly relatives, they should read this AARP article on how to prevent forced guardianship. Scary stuff. But at any age its a good idea to set up Advanced Directives and all that with people you trust.)
If he had secrets he felt he needed to keep hidden I hope he did the work one needs to do to keep them hidden in life as well as in death (if in death you don't have cares, you also don't have embarrassment).
If you have letters, photos, books, or other evidence of your secret life, you do have to work to prevent them from going into your estate at your death. Simply storing letters in a hosted email service, like storing letters in a storage unit, isn't sufficient. You'd have to make special arrangements to keep your post office boxes and safety deposit boxes private after death: the default is that your estate gets distributed, not destroyed. If you have storage that's not under your name, and that only very trusted other people know about, then you might keep it out of your estate. Simply putting letters into a safety deposit box or storage rented under your own name hasn't ever given people pre-death privacy, let alone after-death privacy.
In this case there is no evidence the soldier was trying to keep this address private. I assume he emailed his family from it, because his family members knew it existed. In this case his Yahoo address is like a post office box or a rented office unders one's own name. Offices or mailboxes are private in life, but once you're dead they're part of the estate. Heck, even if you're incapacitated they aren't private. I've had the terrible burden of holding a POA for a severely ill person- for all intents and purposes I was legally that other person. Medical records, bank records, storage units, probably even his Permanent School Record: all legally accessible to me, and again, that was when he was alive. Generally after a death there'll be at least one person with at least as much access to your stuff.
So Yahoo is acting like the exception here, not the rule, in denying his family / the estate access to his items stored at Yahoo. Of course, given how easy it is for the FBI / CIA / NSA to get into Yahoo accounts, why would anyone store anything private there? A physical storage unit would at least require a subpoena (or non-payment) before other people could get inside.
For email privacy that survives into death you'd want an account where you use heavy encryption, never use your real name (emails can always be forwarded) and use onion routers (thanks, EFF) to get to the account. For physical-item privacy you'd need to do the same sort of work. Harsh, but that's life.
As for the soldier's family, they should tell the RIAA / BSA / FBI he was storing music / illegal copies of software / subversive literature there. After a few minutes Interpol should copy the account and shares it with other agencies. Then a FOIA request should get them the emails after a few years.
My sympathies for your loss. We had deaths in the family this year, and we also
did everything possible to inform all of their friends and contacts, and
wanted "things to hold on to even for momentary comfort"
In our case, email wasn't an issue, but there were certainly plenty of letters, accounts, photos, safe-deposit boxes and all that to go through.
In the case of letters, whether electronic or paper the writer generally is the owner of the copyright, even if she isn't storing them at home. Ownership then goes to the next of kin as with any other possessions. Yahoo here is acting like a storage unit, but one which claims it can keep your stuff not only if you don't pay but also if you pass away. If your dad kept his car in a storage lot (or his papers in a storage unit) you'd have every right to claim it as part of his estate.
Privacy in death has to be up to the individual *before* they die. Once you're dead, you cannot dictate what people do with your posessions other than the normal process of distribution through wills and trusts. Destruction, on the other hand, isn't something you can force your estate to do (if you told it to burn the manuscripts or put down the parrot).
I had a relative who recently died. He spent 3 years in a nursing home-- in his 60's, at an age you'd never think you'd be in a home otherwise mostly filled with 80-90 year old women (there's that scary ratio again. If you're a guy wanting evidence of why you need to shape up, visit your nearest nursing home. You'll see it.)
6 years ago he was at the top of his career, doing great research, planning fantastic projects. Then illnesses hit like tornados, tearing his career and health away.
So you'd think he'd just want to kill himself-- how could you ever come to terms with such a change? But, you know, humans are resilient, and the desire to live is tenacious. He learned, most people there learned, to make the best of it. He did go the "Rage, rage" way a few times, but mostly he had peace. Contemplation. TV and music. Family visits. He was no more or less happy in the nursing home than before it all happened: just the focus of happiness changed.
Now, in contrast, the Nursing Home of 2904 is going to Rock. First, its not going to be a nursing home, but a regenerative center for people who need time off while cloned body parts are growing for the transplant. Or a cell-by-cell Hans Moravec style mind transfer zone. Or a place for people to live who want to review, organize and backup their entire lives before they die / copy themselves / do a massive personality change.
It doesn't have to be a home: it could be a life-support exoskeleton letting you wander the world. Or a Matrix-style feed, but one without crazed killer AIs. Unless you want them there. Unless Microsoft-RIAA has taken over, you'll have all the social networks, movies, music, books, interactives, VR worlds, MMOGs, and world's largest poker tournaments you've ever wanted to experience.
For food you can have direct olfactory / taste stimulation. For fun you can have direct any-other-type-of-nerve stimulation.
Yes, it will be a big change from the previous 860 years- a step down, a shrinking of your life. But you'll learn to adapt. People are resilient. If you choose to spend your last century in a nursing home (don't know why you'd choose that, but go ahead) you'll be just as happy as you were in the previous 900 years.
On the other hand, for a well-written SF noir on why immortality and the rich don't mix, try Richard Morgan's extraordinary Altered Carbon.
If you want a sharp little story that will make you empathize with potentially immortal people (a good counter-argument to the Leon Kasses who think that death makes us human) then I highly recommend Border Guards by Greg Egan. Very good writer: lots of deeply-weirds-you-out in a good way thought experiments. many stories online.
So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.
As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.
"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.
And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.
You'll find significant scholarly debate on whether or not that 'strive for 120 years' means that 1. 'Nobody gets to be 120+ anymore' (neverminding the Bible having a few people, and not just right after the flood, living to be over 120) or 2. 'In 120 years the earth is toast. In a flood the toaster sort of way.' Not an unambiguous verse.
Jeanne Calment made 122. And her tenant made the Worse Reverse-Morgage Ever. Next oldest validated ages were 119 and 117. Currently we have 59 living supercenenarians although if you're #1 you just know that #2 is waiting for you to go so they get their 60,500,000 minutes of fame (but boy that male to female ratio: not so good.)
Nevermind 1,000 for now- lets just look at if an average of 150 was possible (22% more than the current record for documented oldest person, 100% more than today. Not a giant leap. Humanity has handled a 100% leap before.) If the wealthy elite care about making it past 150 they'll be using a decent fraction of their riches to hand out extended lifespans to everyone else. You can recover from a dip in net worth. Death in the pandemic of 2071 isn't so fixable. Why the pandemic?
We know if teenagers think they're likely to die early (violent neighborhood, say) or they're unlikely to have a family (because they die early / other reasons), then they often live risky lives w/ short planning horizons. Even if its causing a feedback loop, it is rational behavior if, in fact, the local average lifespan is low.
Ditto for a sense of control and ownership of your health / home / public spaces and "the commons." If they aren't "defensible," that is, your hard work to protect them is easily ruined by external factors, then rationally you don't put much time into taking care of them. (Note that a "commons" meant that multiple people had predictable control over an area: outsiders couldn't arbitrarily ruin them.)
So even now we know we shouldn't have neighborhoods / countries / regions where most people think their lifespan is half of the worldwide average, or that they can't control their health or local environment. Their rational behavior can change their health / environment for the worse (nevermind the problem of angry hopeless young men and wars / violence). Pollution spreads. Epidemics spread. It is in everyone's best interest for all people to think that they're all on the same bell curve with regards to health, lifespan, the environment... for everyone to think and live as if they can make it to their 70's.
Of course currently it isn't true: many countries have significantly lower average life expectancies (even without childhood mortality in the mix). But it doesn't take much to change that: once countries hit a per capita GDP around $2000 then average lifespans get into the 60s to 70s. (Clean water, immunizations, basic access to clinics and medical knowledge). Once women have education and job opportunities birthrates go way down (education isn't the only factor, but the most significant one)
So lets say we can fix Aubrey's big 7 problems (see below) and can expect to reach 150. These aren't overwhelmingly complex solutions. Molecules can be copied: labs are getting cheaper. Science has always been more bazaar than cathedral, and with the internet open-source biology is even easier.
It may be for the most part "sharing" won't be relevant. We'll be "participating," so will most other people. "The rich" won't have much control over KaZaa-Life, and a billion eyeballs'll be keeping track of the anti-viral wetware on Life-Forge. In this case some people will still die young-- some treatments won't work for all people -- but that'd be just bad luck. You'll still try to live like 150 is possible.
But what if some countries are still on different bell curves: they reasonably can expect to live only 45-55, 65 years if they're lucky. They'll behave differently- taking more risks, discounting the future- not out of anger or jealousy (though never ignore the power of those), but simply because its rational. Using more untested / black-market copies of drugs. Perhaps slightly less likely to use antibiotics in "old" (=60+) age.
AdG writes that epidemics can still get us. Even without malicious intent they'll be more likely to come from the regions where lifespans are 1/3 the average. So again, if the wealthy elite (or 1st world countries generally) want to reach 150, we'll be handing out our telomere lengthening inhibitors and ATase like candy (low-glycolic index candy).
Admittedly I'm used to, and like, the old interface of Google Groups. Or at least I'm used to it. But out of curiousity I went to the beta site and tried to do a search...
So lets say I'm unfamiliar with groups and usenet, but have been having problems with spam in my inbox. So I go to beta groups and lookup Spam. Results: 146 groups. Of these:
Most results on the first pages of results are for created groups (not usenet groups).
if they are about spam, they have 1 or 2 members, rarely more (two with 40+ members).
most created groups aren't about spam, they just have statements like 'Spam isn't tolerated here'
By the time you get to Usenet groups, you're dealing with odd little alt.spam.* groups and other very low volume Usenet groups
None of the results are for actual Usnet spam groups like NANAE or NANAS
If instead you're in Old Groups, a search on spam gets you NANAE and NANAS at the very top. If you sort by date NANAE still is at the top.
So which search gives better results- BetaGroups with plenty of 2 member spam forums, or OldGroups that gets you to high-volume, deep-history groups where searches alone should result in some answers to questions about spam? I'd say that the Beta-Groups search for "Spam" is essentially useless. Old Groups gets you real discussions (True, lots of noise in that signal, and badly phrased questions from a newbie can get flamed, but the potential search and find actual info about spam exist in this hypothetical Old Groups search, especially if you get to FAQs).
Companies that plan for 12/7 or 13/6 for more than just a few days (or clearly delineated weeks) are scheduling a failure. The very act of assuming and requiring 100% uptime in workers just about guarantees that it can't happen. The problem is a combination of physiology, human factors analysis, and math:
Physiology: increased stress = decreased function of your immune system. Insufficient sleep = increased stress.
Physiology: going without sufficient sleep is equivalent to having a large quantity of alcohol in your system. You can code, but after one night's good sleep you sure aren't going to understand the mindset that made you not comment your gordian-pot of spaghetti code.
Human factors: if you're on a team, you don't want to appear to be doing less work than the others.
and the numbers: 168 hours in a week. 84 for work, 56 for healthy sleep...28 for everything else
Assume all developers find a way to work 12/7: they cancel all vacations, classes, conferences, workshops, ceremonies, weddings and funerals; they telnet into religous services (and never mind all the caselaw protecting rights of religious expression when, for example, it includes having a day of rest); they suspend all taking care of children or parents (nevermind the family medical leave act)...
So what happens the first time one developer gets exposed to a cold or the flu? Under regular 9/6 circumstances you might just say "Look, I'm coming down with something. I'll head out early today to sleep it off": you make up the time later, and everyone appreciates that you didn't expose them to the bug. Instead, under the 12/7 situation you're going to try to tough it out. You don't spend 3 hours at the doctors. You won't get the extra sleep you need, so the illness just gets worse. Because everyone else is sleep deprived, more people are likely to catch the cold from you. Because there is no room for errors / illness / humanity in the schedule, anyone who falls behind will be aware of how they're holding everything up. This causes stress. Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting feedback loops ensue.
And this is assuming everyone is gung-ho for the 12/7 plan. What happens when one developer gets creeped out over having to skip a funeral and decides the only choice is to quit? There won't be time to train a replacement: those 84 hours'll have to be absorbed by everyone else.
And that's just the people: that 12/7 schedule doesn't have wiggle room for all the standard crashes, viruses, connectivity failures, power outages, traffic jams, major news events, and other standard slowdowns in modern office life.
So yes, its doable, but I'm not going to buy anything more important that games from a company that expects those work hours from its employees. Even if they hand out provigil like candy and have IV caffeine drips their code will be fundamentally untrustworthy: I'm not buying important software from overstressed, equivalent-to-drunks zombies.
"The name "Yucca Mountain" is synonymous with danger and excitement. It's so much more than some single-industry desert town with a lot of unusual buildings--the entire place surges with activity and pulses with the thrill of the forbidden. The eerie luminescent glow lights the Nevada sky all through the night. Everyone has heard stories, but no one who hasn't visited can truly understand Yucca Mountain. Why's that? Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: What happens at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility stays at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility.
I can tell you firsthand: There's no place like this in the entire country. The instant you see the strip--the one they pin to your coverall to measure your exposure to radiation--you understand how high the stakes are. Yucca Mountain isn't for the faint of heart. You never get used to the surge of adrenaline you feel watching the Geiger counter whirl, or the frenzy that fills the lab when someone's number comes up...
Face it, there's a reason they call this place Synthetic-High-Radiation-And-Weapons-Research-Bypr oduct-Disposal City. You can try to sell it as a safe, clean site for the long-term storage of 80 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste all you want, but the truth remains that humans have certain desires. The desire for more electricity ain't going to just disappear overnight, and neither are its byproducts. As long as there are people, there will be a need for places like Yucca Mountain. And you didn't hear any of that from me, friend.
We don't like to talk about what goes on at the nation's first geological repository. It simply isn't wise. Even so, stuff gets out. We don't know how--mind you, we'd love to find out. When we do, I can tell you this: There are a few tattlers who'll be sorry. Very sorry. Not that anyone believes the leaks anyway. They're just legends and fragments of tall tales told by loonies found wandering the Mohave with no memory of how they got the burns on their bodies and lesions on their faces. Stories of roller-coaster rides on the wings of probability, people betting it all on a wink from lady luck and one number of the Periodic Table, and then spiraling down into a pit of despair and reinforced concrete when it all goes wrong. Well, believe what you want. No one at Yucca Mountain is talking..."
As to humans making it out to the New World that much earlier than previously known, I'm not surprised... we're a wandering species (and genus), going way back. Modern Homo sapiens was poking about in odd places by 100k years ago, so there isn't any inherent reason why we shouldn't have been there. However, generally when humans arrive in force we tend to leave evidence (like stone age habitats or megafauna extinctions), so these potential first North Americans were keeping fairly quiet, archeologically-wise.
I'm not writing about Pat Volkerding-- he's been seeing doctors and seeking treatment, and I wish him well as he goes to the hospital today along with several friends or family members who do everything possible to keep him there. Hacking the medical system and insurance system is itself a skill we do all need. And, yes, we can do specific things to make ourselves healthier-- reprogram bad habits and all that.
I'm writing in general, about engineers and computer scientists (guys especially) who think that the heuristics of their profession give them any extra advantage over the general public in self-diagnosing illnesses. Its the opposite-- your tools and knowledge, so good for your profession, can harm you when it comes to medical treatment.
Yes, medicine itself is still primative, we've only just built MRIs that can see metabolism by imaging C,N and O on top of H20. Medical error is a leading cause of death. Doctors can believe that real illnesses aren't just psychological - it took medicine a while to accept that bacteria caused ulcers. Sometimes unpatented, ordinary vitamins help with a major symptom of a major illness (and if you have or know someone with diabetes- read the research and go get some benfotiamine!). Medicine is like that.
But the heuristics of medicine are far better than any other for dealing with illnesses. Non-medical common sense is orthogonal to medicine- if it gives good results that's just luck. But given how easily people are helped by placebos, how good are we going to be at telling if a particular treatment is working or not? Given how we can tune out outside signals when working on something (like the need to eat or drink), how often are we going to miss far more subtle clues? Given how personal psychology can make it hard to admit to feeling pain or to talk about body weaknesses (especially guys), how can we make sure that we're telling the doctor all relevant clues? Given how most medical research on the net is in the form of abstracts, not full articles, and given our strong abilities to find patterns (even where there aren't any), how easy is it to be side-tracked into thinking we've diagnosed ourselves when we haven't? Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is an intensely applicable article to everyone.
I recently had a relative who died. With Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia your odds aren't good, but they're far worse if you don't know if you have the methicillin sensitive or the methicillin resistant version: the antibiotics for MRSA don't work very well on MSSA (the reverse is, of course, obvious).
Very tiny differences in what illness you have can make big differences in what treatment you need. Only medical tests- not all the reading and self-diagnoses in the world- will find those differences. Making sure you get those tests- that's hacking the medical and insurance system. Thinking you can figure out on your own what you have or whether or not a treatment is working? That's trying to hack your own body, and our self-assessments on how well we do that aren't very good. Our own self-diagnosis system is worse than the one in Windows (and for spaghetti code without any comments see dna).
"As a result of this continued hostility, researchers say they still know precious little about fundamental questions, including how sexual desire affects judgment, how young people develop a sexual identity, why so many people take sexual risks, how personality and mood affect sexual health and how the explosion of sexual material on the Internet and trysts arranged online affect behavior.
Perhaps the strongest protests have arisen in response to efforts to treat - or even to study - deviant sexual behavior like pedophilia, opposition that has grown only fiercer in the wake of the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.
"I have been in this field for 30 years, and the level of fear and intimidation is higher now than I can ever remember," said Dr. Gilbert Herdt, a researcher at San Francisco State University who runs the National Sexuality Resource Center, a clearinghouse for sexual information. "With the recent election, there's concern that there will be even more intrusion of ideology into science."
He added, "But then, this country has always had a troubled relationship with sex research."
Much of the suspicion is rooted in religious belief. Many devout believers see any effort to catalog sexual behavior as akin to publishing a field guide to carnal sin, an invitation to deviancy. "
As someone else pointed out, the Lancet study did use random sampling:
"Clustering works by picking out a number of neighbourhoods at random--33 in this case--and then surveying all the individuals in that neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods were picked by choosing towns in Iraq at random (the chance that a town would be picked was proportional to its population) and then, in a given town, using GPS--the global positioning system--to select a neighbourhood at random within the town. Starting from the GPS-selected grid reference, the researchers then visited the nearest 30 households."
This is a standard and valid method for sampling. I've done it myself. Go check out a book like Deming's 'Some Theory of Sampling.'
"In each household, the interviewers (all Iraqis fluent in English as well as Arabic) asked about births and deaths that had occurred since January 1st 2002 among people who had lived in the house for more than two months. They also recorded the sexes and ages of people now living in the house. If a death was reported, they recorded the date, cause and circumstances. Their deductions about the number of deaths caused by the war were then made by comparing the aggregate death rates before and after March 18th 2003."
And now you're talking directly to the people who know. Painfully, tearfully know exactly who has died, and happily know who was born.
If someone was doing the same sampling and happened to get your house, wouldn't you know exactly the same information? In the past 3 years I've had 3 deaths and 1 birth in my family. I only have 1 death certificate, but I know to the day and the hour when each death or birth happened. (These didn't happen in my house, but if I lived in an extended family situation they would have.)
Of course, the surveyed people could be mistaken about dates or could lie, so you do some random sampling to check for that (asking neighbors. checking death certificates if they're typical for the date and neighborhood: during the war times certificates might have been harder to come by).
Then you weigh each sample by the population it represents, combine them, use the standard tables to get your sample bounds and errors, and you've got decent results. Better results than passive observers. Infinitely better results than the US Army, which "does not collect this data" but knows to take over the Falluja General Hospital because it was releasing 'inflated' casualty figures. Inflated compared to what data that they knew, exactly?
As they wrote, the two major possible errors of the study would be 1. bad sampling methodology or 2. bad data / mistakes in the analysis. The Economist concludes while 33 samples (includes 7868 people) is on the small side, it is reasonable given other epidemiological studies and the fact that its a war zone. The data itself wouldn't be subject to recall bias, because people don't forget deaths in the family, so...:
"the discrepancy between the Lancet estimate and the aggregated press reports is not as large as it seems at first. The Lancet figure implies that 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, while the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians. Nonetheless, Dr Roberts points out that press reports are a "passive-surveillance system". Reporters do not actively go out to many random areas and see if anyone has been killed in a violent attack, but wait for reports to come in. And, Dr Roberts says, passive-surveillance systems tend to undercount mortality. For instance, when he was head of health policy for the International Rescue Committee in the Congo, in 2001, he found that only 7% of meningitis deaths in an outbreak were recorded by the IRC's passive system. The study is not perfect. But then it does not claim to be. The way forward is to duplicate the Lancet study independently, and at a larger scale."
"The centre of its estimated range of death tolls--the most probable number according to the data collected and the statistics used--is almost 100,000. And even though the limits of that range are very wide, from 8,000 to 194,000, the study concludes with 90% certainty that more than 40,000 Iraqis have died. This is an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary evidence. Is the methodology used... sound enough for reliable conclusions to be drawn from it?"
"Dr Roberts used a technique called clustering, which has been employed extensively in other situations where census data are lacking, such as studying infectious disease in poor countries... They interviewed a total of 7,868 people in 988 households. But the relevant sample size for many purposes--for instance, measuring the uncertainty of the analysis--is 33, the number of clusters. "...the data from individuals within a given cluster are highly correlated. Statistically, 33 is a relatively small sample (though it is the best that could be obtained by a small number of investigators in a country at war). That is the reason for the large range around the central value of 98,000, and is one reason why that figure might be wrong. (Though if this is the case, the true value is as likely to be larger than 98,000 as it is to be smaller.) It does not, however, mean, as some commentators have argued in response to this study, that figures of 8,000 or 194,000 are as likely as one of 98,000. Quite the contrary. The farther one goes from 98,000, the less likely the figure is."
"The second reason the figure might be wrong is if there are mistakes in the analysis, and the whole exercise is thus unreliable. Nan Laird, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, says that she believes both the analysis and the data-gathering techniques used by Dr Roberts to be sound. She points out the possibility of "recall bias"--people may have reported more deaths more recently because they did not recall earlier ones. However, because most people do not forget about the death of a family member, she thinks that this effect, if present, would be small. Arthur Dempster, also a professor of statistics at Harvard, though in a different department from Dr Laird, agrees that the methodology in both design and analysis is at the standard professional level. However, he raises the concern that because violence can be very localised, a sample of 33 clusters really might be too small to be representative."
Crack hit the streets in 1984, and by 1987 the press had run more than 1,000 stories about it, many focusing on the plight of so-called crack babies. The handwringing over these children started in September 1985, when the media got hold of Dr. Ira Chasnoff's New England Journal of Medicine article suggesting that prenatal cocaine exposure could have a devastating effect on infants. Only twenty-three cocaine-using women participated in the study, and Chasnoff warned in the report that more research was needed. But the media paid no heed. Within days of the first story, CBS News found a social worker who claimed that an eighteen-month-old crack-exposed baby she was treating would grow up to have "an IQ of perhaps fifty" and be "barely able to dress herself."
Soon, images of the crack epidemic's "tiniest victims" -- scrawny, trembling infants -- were flooding television screens. Stories about their bleak future abounded. One psychologist told The New York Times that crack was "interfering with the central core of what it is to be human."...
But the day never came. Crack babies, it turns out, were a media myth, not a medical reality. This is not to say that crack is harmless. Infants exposed to cocaine in the womb, including the crystallized version known as crack, weigh an average of 200 grams below normal at birth,... "For a healthy, ten-pound Gerber baby this is no big deal," explains Barry Lester, the principal investigator. But it can make things worse for small, sickly infants.
Lester has also found that the IQs of cocaine-exposed seven-year-olds are four and a half points lower on average, and some researchers have documented other subtle problems. Perhaps more damaging than being exposed to cocaine itself is growing up with addicts, who are often incapable of providing a stable, nurturing home. But so-called crack babies are by no means ruined. Most fare far better, in fact, than children whose mothers drink heavily while pregnant..."
As that article ends: "scientific evidence isn't always enough to kill a good story." Those 'crack babies' (note that babies cannot actually be addicted to cocaine at birth) are now 20 years old. The stigma of being called a 'crack baby', and the damage of believing the rumors that 'crack babies' cannot succeed, did far more damage to these kids than being underweight at birth could do.
If anyone tries to bring up the bombardier beetle, or any of a very large number of hackneyed old arguments (including ones which even even the creationists say to not use), the index of Creationist arguments is a great place to start. It is like Snopes for these arguments.
(note, I may have gotten the branch points wrong, although they're also in a state of flux, see the link ahead)
Chimps, which themselves have had 6 million years of evolution since our last common ancestor, aren't so stupid themselves. They use very simple tools and are capable (at least some Bonobos in captivity) of learning to understand human language. Not to mention that some argument can be made to put paniscus and trogdolytes into the Homo genus. (Other species as closely related as chimps and humans do get put in the same genus. But there are political reasons to keep them as Pan and Homo, so it'll probably be a couple of decades before the naming move is made.)
When you look at the graph of brain size vs height for human species on that same page, there is an overlap between erectus and sapiens, and erectus was notable for fire and for creatively making up new stone tools. What I'd assume is that as H.f. became smaller, evolutionary pressure would have maintained as much intelligence as possible... slightly denser grey matter, losing acuity in less important senses. Suppose we'll have to wait for the scans of the insides of the skulls to show what folding is visible there.
I'm not surprised that any member of the Homo family shows intelligence-- we've been doing that for a few million years, and simply shrinking one cousin species ought not to remove too much of it as its a major part of what we are.
While the smallest of the small modern human overlaps with non-pygmy H. erectus, as written here: "The low volume skulls were not primitive or aberrant in any way; their small volume was merely a result of the smallness of the entire skull. So although the extreme lower range of modern human brain sizes does overlap that of Homo erectus, their skulls are very different: in H. erectus, the brain case really is smaller in relation to the rest of the skull. In small modern humans, the skull proportions are normal and the brain size is small only because the skull is small." When you compare the two, (another example here , or look at a comparison of multiple Hominids here) you can see that H. erectus isn't ever going to be mistaken for a small-skulled H. sapiens. The pygmy H. erectus has a brain that's half the size of a regular H. erectus. Floresiensis is smart and a tool/ fire user because Homo had been doing that for 2 million years, not because its a Homo sapiens.
Summarizing species and brain sizes...
1. Last common ancestor (Gorilla, Pan, Hominid)
modern Gorilla (average 500 cc)
2. Last common ancestor (Pan, Hominid)
modern Chimp (average 400 cc) 3. Australopithecus (375 to 550 cc)
4. Homo habilis (500 to 800 cc)
5. Homo erectus-> ->5a.Homo floresiensis (750 to 1225 cc) (380 cc)
6.Homo antecessor
| \ 6b. H.s. neanderthalensis (average 1450 cc)
| 6a. H. s. archaic (average 1200 cc) (sometimes called H. heidelbergensis)
| 7. Homo sapiens sapiens (average 1350 cc)
Many of these issues were discussed in earlier stories-- Open Source Life, Smart Breeding as a way to beat GM biotech and Open Source Biotech. As commented , there's a big problem with much of current GM technology: It is proprietary / closed source / locked hood genetics. The applications are wonderful (note: I've GM'd organisms myself), but the methodology and implementations are badly done
Its analogous to proprietary software: you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and support and perhaps hardware too). In much of current GM technology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (w/a limited selection of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year.
Problems with the closed-source methods of GM tech include:
GM isn't the only solution. Word isn't the only way to write a document. Golden rice isn't the only way to get more vitamin A to people.
Opportunity Costs- what do you lose if you spend a big chunk of money on a single proprietary solution? You lose flexibility. Continuing with Golden Rice: sure, its gets people more vitamin A, and no one wants blind babies (think of the children!). But what about veggies which already contain high quantities of beta-carotene (yams? carrots? Other richly-colored veggies and fruits filled with other vitamins / phytochemicals we've smart-bred in for 3000+ years). The royalty payments for Golden Rice could instead pay for a variety of other seeds. And if you do want to up the A content of rice, should people get to choose which varieties get upgraded?
Useful applications get locked away. Losing a beautiful algorithm in software? Sad. Losing 100,000 lives per year?...more of a life-or-death choice. If it weren't for the facial hair application those people'd be back to injecting arsenic medicine with its 1/20 chance of death and the feel of injecting bleach.
The food itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle. The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects. Documented cases of stealing? the Neem patent- patenting a 2000 year old method of using the Neem tree oil as a pesticide. Or the Enola yellow bean patent where an American company got a patent on a bean they'd bought from Mexican bean farmers. They then sued those farmers exporting yellow beans into the US. They're not only violating the GPL, but patenting the software they've borrowed.
Standards for patents can be low. I argue that they're often not being novel. Take BT: is simply moving a gene that original?
They're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures and kill off smaller but better competitors. Monocultures = bad: think 1/4 the US corn crop wiped out in one season.
they have all or nothing security models (they focus on zero tolerance for weeds / pests: in the long run this will be more expensive than "accep
Doctors who refused to prescribe placebos instead of antibiotics for viruses... yes, they should get more blame.
But I still blame people (ordinary or policy makers) who have no fundamental understanding of why they should only take an antibiotic to fight a susceptible bacteria. If you believe evolution then (tautologically) you believe in small changes in the gene pool over time. Small changes in environments cause small changes in the gene pool. Given enough organisms this leads to new characteristics in organisms or new species: furry elephants and naked apes and all that. And that One human with an infection equals enough organisms to have changes in the gene pool. So the person believing in evolution fundamentally understands why he/she should not mess around with antibiotics.
Anyone else (especially policy makers) who doesn't understand evolution is likely to make mistakes. Just like someone who really doesn't understand gravity, stress strain diagrams, etc is likely to make mistakes in judging construction safety. They might make lucky guesses, but they might make horrible errors. With antibiotics they're much more likely to feel complacent about how they fund research or how they treat themselves with leftover antibiotics. And if they didn't learn evolution they probably didn't have enough microbiology to learn that bacteria exchange genes: resistance in one species can get transfered to other species. Their ignorant bliss: my pain.
From the ever accurate Onion newspaper (but article hidden in the premium section now):
"GERLACH, NV -- The Burning Man festival, a prominent artistic and countercultural event that draws tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert annually, is in danger of cancellation this week because "no one had their shit together enough to even make it," organizers said Tuesday. "Jesus Christ, this is pathetic," said event coordinator Ethan Moon as he angrily gestured toward the empty Black Rock Desert basin expanse, known as the playa. "We've been promoting this thing all year. You can't start panhandling quarters for gas the week before the festival and expect to make it here in time, man."
Moon listed some of the most common no-show excuses, among them oversleeping, forgetting to request time off work, faulty van-borrowing arrangements, a shortage of ochre body-paint, and the last-minute realization that transportation to the Burning Man festival requires money.
...Hippies were not the only counterculture group to miss the Burning Man festival. Portland-area Linux user and self-described cyber-conceptualist "Free" Lance Kaegle explained his absence in an instant message from his studio.
"I was organizing this boss techno-art project called 'Off The Grid,'" Kaegle wrote. "We were going to set up computer terminals in various parts of the playa and have people use them. Then we'd feed the binary data from those terminals into this fractals program that [Silver Lake, CA software designer] Ricky [Thomas-Slater] wrote. Those fractals would be sent, on the fly, to a group of exiled Buddhist monks I befriended online. The monks would transform the fractals into a temporal sand painting, the making of which we would webcast live to everyone on the playa."
Added Kaegle: "But I had to stop working on the monk thing to finish up this Pam's Country Crafts web site I'm working on. I really need the money..."
Staphylococcus aureus is a nasty bug when it causes pneumonia: both the methicillin sensitive and the methicillin resistant forms kill over 40% of the people infected (with MRSA killing almost 60% of people who get it). A short-term hospital patient isn't too likely to get MRSA pneumonia, but any kind of MRSA infection requires lengthy treatments.
In the US and some other countries the protocols for when to use Vancomycin (bad to use it for MSSA because it is less effective than methicillins) is reasonably well established. But elsewhere vancomycin isn't being as well-regulated. And now VRSA is showing up. In the US we also have quinupristin (good for people allergic to vancomycin). And there is one other antibiotic- Teicoplanin- which works as well as Vancomycin but isn't yet available in the US. And one more antibiotic in phase III trials...
And then that's it. Do you have a relative in a nursing home? Or who goes to the hospital regularly? 60% mortality.
As I'm still in the anger phase of grief I'll assign blame...
Zero percent to the scientists: in college many years ago I heard warnings about basic research on antibiotics being underfunded.
20% to hospitals which didn't adopt alcohol (gel) hand cleaning (after leaving any patient) quickly enough. Now any ICU/CCU has gel dispensers outside of every room and at all entrances.
30% to nursing homes which still haven't fully adopted more thorough hand washing, etc procedures.
48% to the people (general public and government officials) who refuse to understand that bodies are ecosystems and antibiotics are environmental changes which cause bacterial evolution. Schools are afraid to teach evolution and so kids can graduate without any critical knowledge of why the doctor is asking them to finish the entire bottle of pills. As to government officials- if you don't believe in gravity I don't want you anywhere near building code designs or approvals. If you don't believe in evolution I don't want you anywhere near health policy funding issues.
and 2% to Leon Kass, because 'death is a blessing whether you know it or not' [paraphrased] from the head of bioethics for the president just doesn't give me hope for how the president approaches issues like funding basic research.
This article just seems off, knocking down a few straw men and then saying SF isn't very strong.
First, as I recently wrote, SF SF isn't about prediction. It rarely claims to be, and the prediction-style books are rarely the gems. Its about how we might react to new circumstances (ordinary life which just happens to be set in the 2060's), how trends- if amplified- could affect us, and most importantly, its about Sensawunda. Atwood wasn't predicting Fundies taking over the US, but she captured the feel of the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. We don't have a cyberpunk life, but SF has given us premonitions of what DRM, the Induce act, and Axciom can do once they get powerful enough.
Much of the best new SF is near term work. Charlie Stross reads like the next 30 years of slashdot stories are on his hard-drive. Kress, Egan, Marusek, Stephenson... they've got plenty of stories set 10-40 years away, not hundreds or thousands.
And then focusing on Sawyer-- they've bought into his self-promotion. He's ok, but he isn't the only Canadian SF writer (as also recently written there are several Canadian writers who could take him on even with the "e" key missing on their keyboards). And someone like Stross has more throwaway / background predictions in his near future stories (for example in the 2010's setting for Lobsters) than Sawyer can make in an actual "predictions" article (see 2nd link above).
"Recruiting Individuals." Documents how individuals are being recruited to serve as "eyes and ears" for the authorities even after Congress rejected the infamous TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program that would have recruited workers like cable repairmen to spy on their customers.
"Recruiting Companies." Examines how companies are pressured to voluntarily provide consumer information to the government; the many ways security agencies can force companies to turn over sensitive information under federal laws such as the Patriot Act; how the government is forcing companies to participate in watchlist programs and in systems for the automatic scrutiny of individuals' financial transactions
"Mass Data Use, Public and Private." Focuses on the government's use of private data on a mass scale, either through data mining programs like the MATRIX state information-sharing program, or the purchase of information from private-sector data aggregators.
"Pro-Surveillance Lobbying." Looks at the flip side of the issue: how some companies are pushing the government to adopt surveillance technologies and programs based on private-sector data
This privatized surveillance...
"gives the government access to private-sector databases...who hold most of the details of Americans' lives.
"lets the government create a system of "distributed surveillance"... in which scattered, individual, independent sources of information are brought together...
It shifts costs from the government to the private sector...
It creates constant uncertainty whenever people are in a situation where an informant might be present, enormously amplifying the effect of government surveillance on individual behavior and psychology
It offers what is a often a path of least resistance to working around privacy laws.
It allows the government to carry out privacy-invading practices at "arm's length" by piggy-backing on or actually cultivating data collection in the private sector that it could not carry out itself without serious legal or political repercussions.
He's a decent writer, although a bit overpromoting on the 'biggest, baddest Canadian writer' thing. (I think any of Doctorow, Gardner, Gibson, Hopkinson or Kay could take him on even with the "e" missing from their keyboards for style and characterization.)
But anyways, as I just wrote in the Singularity vs SF thread, SF is almost never about prediction. Its about showing how people will react to major changes in science or society. Sure, there've been some lucky hits, and there are SF writers who enjoy extended infodumps, but that's not the point / not the goal.
With SF you're trying to capture the feel of ordinary life under new (to us) circumstances. The best SF ( short stories or novels, or award nominees) often read like ordinary books, just from very far away. As an example, the Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting the future of the US. But look how well it captured the look and feel of a country taken over by religious fundies (i.e. the Taliban).
For a much better take on what life might be like in the 2010's, read Stross's award nominated first story in his Accelerando set. At peak density one of his paragraphs contain more predictions than all of Sawyer's article, yet Lobsters also includes sensawunda. (sensawunda: hard to define, but its analogous to Chesterton's quote (my paraphrase): we shouldn't treat 'we can go to the moon' as being just as ordinary and boring as a telephone call. We should realize that being able to call anyone, anywhere in the world is as amazing as being able to go to the moon.)
Hard to capture a single quote, but for example (and this crowd):
[protagonist arrives at a bar for his meeting] "Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard's that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.
"...The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.
"Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he's about to be slashdotted..."
"...Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"
Slashdot Mirror
If he had secrets he felt he needed to keep hidden I hope he did the work one needs to do to keep them hidden in life as well as in death (if in death you don't have cares, you also don't have embarrassment).
If you have letters, photos, books, or other evidence of your secret life, you do have to work to prevent them from going into your estate at your death. Simply storing letters in a hosted email service, like storing letters in a storage unit, isn't sufficient. You'd have to make special arrangements to keep your post office boxes and safety deposit boxes private after death: the default is that your estate gets distributed, not destroyed. If you have storage that's not under your name, and that only very trusted other people know about, then you might keep it out of your estate. Simply putting letters into a safety deposit box or storage rented under your own name hasn't ever given people pre-death privacy, let alone after-death privacy.
In this case there is no evidence the soldier was trying to keep this address private. I assume he emailed his family from it, because his family members knew it existed. In this case his Yahoo address is like a post office box or a rented office unders one's own name. Offices or mailboxes are private in life, but once you're dead they're part of the estate. Heck, even if you're incapacitated they aren't private. I've had the terrible burden of holding a POA for a severely ill person- for all intents and purposes I was legally that other person. Medical records, bank records, storage units, probably even his Permanent School Record: all legally accessible to me, and again, that was when he was alive. Generally after a death there'll be at least one person with at least as much access to your stuff.
So Yahoo is acting like the exception here, not the rule, in denying his family / the estate access to his items stored at Yahoo. Of course, given how easy it is for the FBI / CIA / NSA to get into Yahoo accounts, why would anyone store anything private there? A physical storage unit would at least require a subpoena (or non-payment) before other people could get inside.
For email privacy that survives into death you'd want an account where you use heavy encryption, never use your real name (emails can always be forwarded) and use onion routers (thanks, EFF) to get to the account. For physical-item privacy you'd need to do the same sort of work. Harsh, but that's life.
As for the soldier's family, they should tell the RIAA / BSA / FBI he was storing music / illegal copies of software / subversive literature there. After a few minutes Interpol should copy the account and shares it with other agencies. Then a FOIA request should get them the emails after a few years.
- did everything possible to inform all of their friends and contacts, and
- wanted "things to hold on to even for momentary comfort"
In our case, email wasn't an issue, but there were certainly plenty of letters, accounts, photos, safe-deposit boxes and all that to go through.In the case of letters, whether electronic or paper the writer generally is the owner of the copyright, even if she isn't storing them at home. Ownership then goes to the next of kin as with any other possessions. Yahoo here is acting like a storage unit, but one which claims it can keep your stuff not only if you don't pay but also if you pass away. If your dad kept his car in a storage lot (or his papers in a storage unit) you'd have every right to claim it as part of his estate.
Privacy in death has to be up to the individual *before* they die. Once you're dead, you cannot dictate what people do with your posessions other than the normal process of distribution through wills and trusts. Destruction, on the other hand, isn't something you can force your estate to do (if you told it to burn the manuscripts or put down the parrot).
6 years ago he was at the top of his career, doing great research, planning fantastic projects. Then illnesses hit like tornados, tearing his career and health away.
So you'd think he'd just want to kill himself-- how could you ever come to terms with such a change? But, you know, humans are resilient, and the desire to live is tenacious. He learned, most people there learned, to make the best of it. He did go the "Rage, rage" way a few times, but mostly he had peace. Contemplation. TV and music. Family visits. He was no more or less happy in the nursing home than before it all happened: just the focus of happiness changed.
Now, in contrast, the Nursing Home of 2904 is going to Rock. First, its not going to be a nursing home, but a regenerative center for people who need time off while cloned body parts are growing for the transplant. Or a cell-by-cell Hans Moravec style mind transfer zone. Or a place for people to live who want to review, organize and backup their entire lives before they die / copy themselves / do a massive personality change.
It doesn't have to be a home: it could be a life-support exoskeleton letting you wander the world. Or a Matrix-style feed, but one without crazed killer AIs. Unless you want them there. Unless Microsoft-RIAA has taken over, you'll have all the social networks, movies, music, books, interactives, VR worlds, MMOGs, and world's largest poker tournaments you've ever wanted to experience.
For food you can have direct olfactory / taste stimulation. For fun you can have direct any-other-type-of-nerve stimulation.
Yes, it will be a big change from the previous 860 years- a step down, a shrinking of your life. But you'll learn to adapt. People are resilient. If you choose to spend your last century in a nursing home (don't know why you'd choose that, but go ahead) you'll be just as happy as you were in the previous 900 years.
On the other hand, for a well-written SF noir on why immortality and the rich don't mix, try Richard Morgan's extraordinary Altered Carbon.
So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.
As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.
"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.
And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.
We know if teenagers think they're likely to die early (violent neighborhood, say) or they're unlikely to have a family (because they die early / other reasons), then they often live risky lives w/ short planning horizons. Even if its causing a feedback loop, it is rational behavior if, in fact, the local average lifespan is low.
Ditto for a sense of control and ownership of your health / home / public spaces and "the commons." If they aren't "defensible," that is, your hard work to protect them is easily ruined by external factors, then rationally you don't put much time into taking care of them. (Note that a "commons" meant that multiple people had predictable control over an area: outsiders couldn't arbitrarily ruin them.)
So even now we know we shouldn't have neighborhoods / countries / regions where most people think their lifespan is half of the worldwide average, or that they can't control their health or local environment. Their rational behavior can change their health / environment for the worse (nevermind the problem of angry hopeless young men and wars / violence). Pollution spreads. Epidemics spread. It is in everyone's best interest for all people to think that they're all on the same bell curve with regards to health, lifespan, the environment... for everyone to think and live as if they can make it to their 70's.
Of course currently it isn't true: many countries have significantly lower average life expectancies (even without childhood mortality in the mix). But it doesn't take much to change that: once countries hit a per capita GDP around $2000 then average lifespans get into the 60s to 70s. (Clean water, immunizations, basic access to clinics and medical knowledge). Once women have education and job opportunities birthrates go way down (education isn't the only factor, but the most significant one)
So lets say we can fix Aubrey's big 7 problems (see below) and can expect to reach 150. These aren't overwhelmingly complex solutions. Molecules can be copied: labs are getting cheaper. Science has always been more bazaar than cathedral, and with the internet open-source biology is even easier.
It may be for the most part "sharing" won't be relevant. We'll be "participating," so will most other people. "The rich" won't have much control over KaZaa-Life, and a billion eyeballs'll be keeping track of the anti-viral wetware on Life-Forge. In this case some people will still die young-- some treatments won't work for all people -- but that'd be just bad luck. You'll still try to live like 150 is possible.
But what if some countries are still on different bell curves: they reasonably can expect to live only 45-55, 65 years if they're lucky. They'll behave differently- taking more risks, discounting the future- not out of anger or jealousy (though never ignore the power of those), but simply because its rational. Using more untested / black-market copies of drugs. Perhaps slightly less likely to use antibiotics in "old" (=60+) age.
AdG writes that epidemics can still get us. Even without malicious intent they'll be more likely to come from the regions where lifespans are 1/3 the average. So again, if the wealthy elite (or 1st world countries generally) want to reach 150, we'll be handing out our telomere lengthening inhibitors and ATase like candy (low-glycolic index candy).
The 7 problems & solutions:
So lets say I'm unfamiliar with groups and usenet, but have been having problems with spam in my inbox. So I go to beta groups and lookup Spam. Results: 146 groups. Of these:
- Most results on the first pages of results are for created groups (not usenet groups).
- if they are about spam, they have 1 or 2 members, rarely more (two with 40+ members).
- most created groups aren't about spam, they just have statements like 'Spam isn't tolerated here'
- By the time you get to Usenet groups, you're dealing with odd little alt.spam.* groups and other very low volume Usenet groups
- None of the results are for actual Usnet spam groups like NANAE or NANAS
If instead you're in Old Groups, a search on spam gets you NANAE and NANAS at the very top. If you sort by date NANAE still is at the top.So which search gives better results- BetaGroups with plenty of 2 member spam forums, or OldGroups that gets you to high-volume, deep-history groups where searches alone should result in some answers to questions about spam? I'd say that the Beta-Groups search for "Spam" is essentially useless. Old Groups gets you real discussions (True, lots of noise in that signal, and badly phrased questions from a newbie can get flamed, but the potential search and find actual info about spam exist in this hypothetical Old Groups search, especially if you get to FAQs).
- Physiology: increased stress = decreased function of your immune system. Insufficient sleep = increased stress.
- Physiology: going without sufficient sleep is equivalent to having a large quantity of alcohol in your system. You can code, but after one night's good sleep you sure aren't going to understand the mindset that made you not comment your gordian-pot of spaghetti code.
- Human factors: if you're on a team, you don't want to appear to be doing less work than the others.
- and the numbers: 168 hours in a week. 84 for work, 56 for healthy sleep...28 for everything else
Assume all developers find a way to work 12/7: they cancel all vacations, classes, conferences, workshops, ceremonies, weddings and funerals; they telnet into religous services (and never mind all the caselaw protecting rights of religious expression when, for example, it includes having a day of rest); they suspend all taking care of children or parents (nevermind the family medical leave act)...So what happens the first time one developer gets exposed to a cold or the flu? Under regular 9/6 circumstances you might just say "Look, I'm coming down with something. I'll head out early today to sleep it off": you make up the time later, and everyone appreciates that you didn't expose them to the bug. Instead, under the 12/7 situation you're going to try to tough it out. You don't spend 3 hours at the doctors. You won't get the extra sleep you need, so the illness just gets worse. Because everyone else is sleep deprived, more people are likely to catch the cold from you. Because there is no room for errors / illness / humanity in the schedule, anyone who falls behind will be aware of how they're holding everything up. This causes stress. Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting feedback loops ensue.
And this is assuming everyone is gung-ho for the 12/7 plan. What happens when one developer gets creeped out over having to skip a funeral and decides the only choice is to quit? There won't be time to train a replacement: those 84 hours'll have to be absorbed by everyone else.
And that's just the people: that 12/7 schedule doesn't have wiggle room for all the standard crashes, viruses, connectivity failures, power outages, traffic jams, major news events, and other standard slowdowns in modern office life.
So yes, its doable, but I'm not going to buy anything more important that games from a company that expects those work hours from its employees. Even if they hand out provigil like candy and have IV caffeine drips their code will be fundamentally untrustworthy: I'm not buying important software from overstressed, equivalent-to-drunks zombies.
According to this important Yucca Mountain article:
"The name "Yucca Mountain" is synonymous with danger and excitement. It's so much more than some single-industry desert town with a lot of unusual buildings--the entire place surges with activity and pulses with the thrill of the forbidden. The eerie luminescent glow lights the Nevada sky all through the night. Everyone has heard stories, but no one who hasn't visited can truly understand Yucca Mountain. Why's that? Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: What happens at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility stays at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility.
I can tell you firsthand: There's no place like this in the entire country. The instant you see the strip--the one they pin to your coverall to measure your exposure to radiation--you understand how high the stakes are. Yucca Mountain isn't for the faint of heart. You never get used to the surge of adrenaline you feel watching the Geiger counter whirl, or the frenzy that fills the lab when someone's number comes up...
Face it, there's a reason they call this place Synthetic-High-Radiation-And-Weapons-Research-Bypr oduct-Disposal City. You can try to sell it as a safe, clean site for the long-term storage of 80 million pounds of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste all you want, but the truth remains that humans have certain desires. The desire for more electricity ain't going to just disappear overnight, and neither are its byproducts. As long as there are people, there will be a need for places like Yucca Mountain. And you didn't hear any of that from me, friend.
We don't like to talk about what goes on at the nation's first geological repository. It simply isn't wise. Even so, stuff gets out. We don't know how--mind you, we'd love to find out. When we do, I can tell you this: There are a few tattlers who'll be sorry. Very sorry. Not that anyone believes the leaks anyway. They're just legends and fragments of tall tales told by loonies found wandering the Mohave with no memory of how they got the burns on their bodies and lesions on their faces. Stories of roller-coaster rides on the wings of probability, people betting it all on a wink from lady luck and one number of the Periodic Table, and then spiraling down into a pit of despair and reinforced concrete when it all goes wrong. Well, believe what you want. No one at Yucca Mountain is talking..."
Finding new skeletons in older rock can be easy. Finding fossilized skeletons- the same age as the rock- that would be interesting.
For more reading, check out the whole index of standard creationist claims, as well as their good set of FAQS, including How do we know the age of the earth?, and fossil hominids.
As to humans making it out to the New World that much earlier than previously known, I'm not surprised... we're a wandering species (and genus), going way back. Modern Homo sapiens was poking about in odd places by 100k years ago, so there isn't any inherent reason why we shouldn't have been there. However, generally when humans arrive in force we tend to leave evidence (like stone age habitats or megafauna extinctions), so these potential first North Americans were keeping fairly quiet, archeologically-wise.
I'm writing in general, about engineers and computer scientists (guys especially) who think that the heuristics of their profession give them any extra advantage over the general public in self-diagnosing illnesses. Its the opposite-- your tools and knowledge, so good for your profession, can harm you when it comes to medical treatment.
Yes, medicine itself is still primative, we've only just built MRIs that can see metabolism by imaging C,N and O on top of H20. Medical error is a leading cause of death. Doctors can believe that real illnesses aren't just psychological - it took medicine a while to accept that bacteria caused ulcers. Sometimes unpatented, ordinary vitamins help with a major symptom of a major illness (and if you have or know someone with diabetes- read the research and go get some benfotiamine!). Medicine is like that.
But the heuristics of medicine are far better than any other for dealing with illnesses. Non-medical common sense is orthogonal to medicine- if it gives good results that's just luck. But given how easily people are helped by placebos, how good are we going to be at telling if a particular treatment is working or not? Given how we can tune out outside signals when working on something (like the need to eat or drink), how often are we going to miss far more subtle clues? Given how personal psychology can make it hard to admit to feeling pain or to talk about body weaknesses (especially guys), how can we make sure that we're telling the doctor all relevant clues? Given how most medical research on the net is in the form of abstracts, not full articles, and given our strong abilities to find patterns (even where there aren't any), how easy is it to be side-tracked into thinking we've diagnosed ourselves when we haven't? Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is an intensely applicable article to everyone.
I recently had a relative who died. With Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia your odds aren't good, but they're far worse if you don't know if you have the methicillin sensitive or the methicillin resistant version: the antibiotics for MRSA don't work very well on MSSA (the reverse is, of course, obvious).
Very tiny differences in what illness you have can make big differences in what treatment you need. Only medical tests- not all the reading and self-diagnoses in the world- will find those differences. Making sure you get those tests- that's hacking the medical and insurance system. Thinking you can figure out on your own what you have or whether or not a treatment is working? That's trying to hack your own body, and our self-assessments on how well we do that aren't very good. Our own self-diagnosis system is worse than the one in Windows (and for spaghetti code without any comments see dna).
"As a result of this continued hostility, researchers say they still know precious little about fundamental questions, including how sexual desire affects judgment, how young people develop a sexual identity, why so many people take sexual risks, how personality and mood affect sexual health and how the explosion of sexual material on the Internet and trysts arranged online affect behavior.
Perhaps the strongest protests have arisen in response to efforts to treat - or even to study - deviant sexual behavior like pedophilia, opposition that has grown only fiercer in the wake of the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.
"I have been in this field for 30 years, and the level of fear and intimidation is higher now than I can ever remember," said Dr. Gilbert Herdt, a researcher at San Francisco State University who runs the National Sexuality Resource Center, a clearinghouse for sexual information. "With the recent election, there's concern that there will be even more intrusion of ideology into science."
He added, "But then, this country has always had a troubled relationship with sex research."
Much of the suspicion is rooted in religious belief. Many devout believers see any effort to catalog sexual behavior as akin to publishing a field guide to carnal sin, an invitation to deviancy. "
"Clustering works by picking out a number of neighbourhoods at random--33 in this case--and then surveying all the individuals in that neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods were picked by choosing towns in Iraq at random (the chance that a town would be picked was proportional to its population) and then, in a given town, using GPS--the global positioning system--to select a neighbourhood at random within the town. Starting from the GPS-selected grid reference, the researchers then visited the nearest 30 households."
This is a standard and valid method for sampling. I've done it myself. Go check out a book like Deming's 'Some Theory of Sampling.'
"In each household, the interviewers (all Iraqis fluent in English as well as Arabic) asked about births and deaths that had occurred since January 1st 2002 among people who had lived in the house for more than two months. They also recorded the sexes and ages of people now living in the house. If a death was reported, they recorded the date, cause and circumstances. Their deductions about the number of deaths caused by the war were then made by comparing the aggregate death rates before and after March 18th 2003."
And now you're talking directly to the people who know. Painfully, tearfully know exactly who has died, and happily know who was born.
If someone was doing the same sampling and happened to get your house, wouldn't you know exactly the same information? In the past 3 years I've had 3 deaths and 1 birth in my family. I only have 1 death certificate, but I know to the day and the hour when each death or birth happened. (These didn't happen in my house, but if I lived in an extended family situation they would have.)
Of course, the surveyed people could be mistaken about dates or could lie, so you do some random sampling to check for that (asking neighbors. checking death certificates if they're typical for the date and neighborhood: during the war times certificates might have been harder to come by).
Then you weigh each sample by the population it represents, combine them, use the standard tables to get your sample bounds and errors, and you've got decent results. Better results than passive observers. Infinitely better results than the US Army, which "does not collect this data" but knows to take over the Falluja General Hospital because it was releasing 'inflated' casualty figures. Inflated compared to what data that they knew, exactly?
"the discrepancy between the Lancet estimate and the aggregated press reports is not as large as it seems at first. The Lancet figure implies that 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, while the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians. Nonetheless, Dr Roberts points out that press reports are a "passive-surveillance system". Reporters do not actively go out to many random areas and see if anyone has been killed in a violent attack, but wait for reports to come in. And, Dr Roberts says, passive-surveillance systems tend to undercount mortality. For instance, when he was head of health policy for the International Rescue Committee in the Congo, in 2001, he found that only 7% of meningitis deaths in an outbreak were recorded by the IRC's passive system. The study is not perfect. But then it does not claim to be. The way forward is to duplicate the Lancet study independently, and at a larger scale."
"The centre of its estimated range of death tolls--the most probable number according to the data collected and the statistics used--is almost 100,000. And even though the limits of that range are very wide, from 8,000 to 194,000, the study concludes with 90% certainty that more than 40,000 Iraqis have died. This is an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary evidence. Is the methodology used... sound enough for reliable conclusions to be drawn from it?"
"Dr Roberts used a technique called clustering, which has been employed extensively in other situations where census data are lacking, such as studying infectious disease in poor countries... They interviewed a total of 7,868 people in 988 households. But the relevant sample size for many purposes--for instance, measuring the uncertainty of the analysis--is 33, the number of clusters. "...the data from individuals within a given cluster are highly correlated. Statistically, 33 is a relatively small sample (though it is the best that could be obtained by a small number of investigators in a country at war). That is the reason for the large range around the central value of 98,000, and is one reason why that figure might be wrong. (Though if this is the case, the true value is as likely to be larger than 98,000 as it is to be smaller.) It does not, however, mean, as some commentators have argued in response to this study, that figures of 8,000 or 194,000 are as likely as one of 98,000. Quite the contrary. The farther one goes from 98,000, the less likely the figure is."
"The second reason the figure might be wrong is if there are mistakes in the analysis, and the whole exercise is thus unreliable. Nan Laird, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, says that she believes both the analysis and the data-gathering techniques used by Dr Roberts to be sound. She points out the possibility of "recall bias"--people may have reported more deaths more recently because they did not recall earlier ones. However, because most people do not forget about the death of a family member, she thinks that this effect, if present, would be small. Arthur Dempster, also a professor of statistics at Harvard, though in a different department from Dr Laird, agrees that the methodology in both design and analysis is at the standard professional level. However, he raises the concern that because violence can be very localised, a sample of 33 clusters really might be too small to be representative."
"This concern is highlighted by the case of
And there it is, argument CB310, a standard argument from incredulity on this beetle and how it could have come into being.
Chimps, which themselves have had 6 million years of evolution since our last common ancestor, aren't so stupid themselves. They use very simple tools and are capable (at least some Bonobos in captivity) of learning to understand human language. Not to mention that some argument can be made to put paniscus and trogdolytes into the Homo genus. (Other species as closely related as chimps and humans do get put in the same genus. But there are political reasons to keep them as Pan and Homo, so it'll probably be a couple of decades before the naming move is made.)
But as this webpage points out (and note the nice side and back views of the skull: most news stories are only showing the front views):
"The accompanying paper on the archaeology also shows the tools found with these little hominids; these weren't simple apes. They were making some wicked weapons and carving tools."
When you look at the graph of brain size vs height for human species on that same page, there is an overlap between erectus and sapiens, and erectus was notable for fire and for creatively making up new stone tools. What I'd assume is that as H.f. became smaller, evolutionary pressure would have maintained as much intelligence as possible... slightly denser grey matter, losing acuity in less important senses. Suppose we'll have to wait for the scans of the insides of the skulls to show what folding is visible there.
I'm not surprised that any member of the Homo family shows intelligence-- we've been doing that for a few million years, and simply shrinking one cousin species ought not to remove too much of it as its a major part of what we are.
Looking at Hominid species and their brain sizes, and the actual information about the fossils themselves, you can examine the differences.
While the smallest of the small modern human overlaps with non-pygmy H. erectus, as written here: "The low volume skulls were not primitive or aberrant in any way; their small volume was merely a result of the smallness of the entire skull. So although the extreme lower range of modern human brain sizes does overlap that of Homo erectus, their skulls are very different: in H. erectus, the brain case really is smaller in relation to the rest of the skull. In small modern humans, the skull proportions are normal and the brain size is small only because the skull is small." When you compare the two, (another example here , or look at a comparison of multiple Hominids here) you can see that H. erectus isn't ever going to be mistaken for a small-skulled H. sapiens. The pygmy H. erectus has a brain that's half the size of a regular H. erectus. Floresiensis is smart and a tool/ fire user because Homo had been doing that for 2 million years, not because its a Homo sapiens.
Summarizing species and brain sizes...
1. Last common ancestor (Gorilla, Pan, Hominid)
modern Gorilla (average 500 cc)
2. Last common ancestor (Pan, Hominid)
modern Chimp (average 400 cc)
3. Australopithecus
(375 to 550 cc)
4. Homo habilis
(500 to 800 cc)
5. Homo erectus-> ->5a.Homo floresiensis
(750 to 1225 cc) (380 cc)
6.Homo antecessor
| \ 6b. H.s. neanderthalensis (average 1450 cc)
|
6a. H. s. archaic
(average 1200 cc)
(sometimes called H. heidelbergensis)
|
7. Homo sapiens sapiens
(average 1350 cc)
Its analogous to proprietary software: you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and support and perhaps hardware too). In much of current GM technology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (w/a limited selection of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year.
Problems with the closed-source methods of GM tech include:
But I still blame people (ordinary or policy makers) who have no fundamental understanding of why they should only take an antibiotic to fight a susceptible bacteria. If you believe evolution then (tautologically) you believe in small changes in the gene pool over time. Small changes in environments cause small changes in the gene pool. Given enough organisms this leads to new characteristics in organisms or new species: furry elephants and naked apes and all that. And that One human with an infection equals enough organisms to have changes in the gene pool. So the person believing in evolution fundamentally understands why he/she should not mess around with antibiotics.
Anyone else (especially policy makers) who doesn't understand evolution is likely to make mistakes. Just like someone who really doesn't understand gravity, stress strain diagrams, etc is likely to make mistakes in judging construction safety. They might make lucky guesses, but they might make horrible errors. With antibiotics they're much more likely to feel complacent about how they fund research or how they treat themselves with leftover antibiotics. And if they didn't learn evolution they probably didn't have enough microbiology to learn that bacteria exchange genes: resistance in one species can get transfered to other species. Their ignorant bliss: my pain.
"GERLACH, NV -- The Burning Man festival, a prominent artistic and countercultural event that draws tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert annually, is in danger of cancellation this week because "no one had their shit together enough to even make it," organizers said Tuesday. "Jesus Christ, this is pathetic," said event coordinator Ethan Moon as he angrily gestured toward the empty Black Rock Desert basin expanse, known as the playa. "We've been promoting this thing all year. You can't start panhandling quarters for gas the week before the festival and expect to make it here in time, man."
Moon listed some of the most common no-show excuses, among them oversleeping, forgetting to request time off work, faulty van-borrowing arrangements, a shortage of ochre body-paint, and the last-minute realization that transportation to the Burning Man festival requires money.
...Hippies were not the only counterculture group to miss the Burning Man festival. Portland-area Linux user and self-described cyber-conceptualist "Free" Lance Kaegle explained his absence in an instant message from his studio.
"I was organizing this boss techno-art project called 'Off The Grid,'" Kaegle wrote. "We were going to set up computer terminals in various parts of the playa and have people use them. Then we'd feed the binary data from those terminals into this fractals program that [Silver Lake, CA software designer] Ricky [Thomas-Slater] wrote. Those fractals would be sent, on the fly, to a group of exiled Buddhist monks I befriended online. The monks would transform the fractals into a temporal sand painting, the making of which we would webcast live to everyone on the playa."
Added Kaegle: "But I had to stop working on the monk thing to finish up this Pam's Country Crafts web site I'm working on. I really need the money..."
In the US and some other countries the protocols for when to use Vancomycin (bad to use it for MSSA because it is less effective than methicillins) is reasonably well established. But elsewhere vancomycin isn't being as well-regulated. And now VRSA is showing up. In the US we also have quinupristin (good for people allergic to vancomycin). And there is one other antibiotic- Teicoplanin- which works as well as Vancomycin but isn't yet available in the US. And one more antibiotic in phase III trials...
And then that's it. Do you have a relative in a nursing home? Or who goes to the hospital regularly? 60% mortality.
As I'm still in the anger phase of grief I'll assign blame...
First, as I recently wrote, SF SF isn't about prediction. It rarely claims to be, and the prediction-style books are rarely the gems. Its about how we might react to new circumstances (ordinary life which just happens to be set in the 2060's), how trends- if amplified- could affect us, and most importantly, its about Sensawunda. Atwood wasn't predicting Fundies taking over the US, but she captured the feel of the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. We don't have a cyberpunk life, but SF has given us premonitions of what DRM, the Induce act, and Axciom can do once they get powerful enough.
Much of the best new SF is near term work. Charlie Stross reads like the next 30 years of slashdot stories are on his hard-drive. Kress, Egan, Marusek, Stephenson... they've got plenty of stories set 10-40 years away, not hundreds or thousands.
And then focusing on Sawyer-- they've bought into his self-promotion. He's ok, but he isn't the only Canadian SF writer (as also recently written there are several Canadian writers who could take him on even with the "e" key missing on their keyboards). And someone like Stross has more throwaway / background predictions in his near future stories (for example in the 2010's setting for Lobsters) than Sawyer can make in an actual "predictions" article (see 2nd link above).
Surveillance-Industrial Complex. It details how the gov't is
- "Recruiting Individuals." Documents how individuals are being recruited to serve as "eyes and ears" for the authorities even after Congress rejected the infamous TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program that would have recruited workers like cable repairmen to spy on their customers.
- "Recruiting Companies." Examines how companies are pressured to voluntarily provide consumer information to the government; the many ways security agencies can force companies to turn over sensitive information under federal laws such as the Patriot Act; how the government is forcing companies to participate in watchlist programs and in systems for the automatic scrutiny of individuals' financial transactions
- "Mass Data Use, Public and Private." Focuses on the government's use of private data on a mass scale, either through data mining programs like the MATRIX state information-sharing program, or the purchase of information from private-sector data aggregators.
- "Pro-Surveillance Lobbying." Looks at the flip side of the issue: how some companies are pushing the government to adopt surveillance technologies and programs based on private-sector data
This privatized surveillance...But anyways, as I just wrote in the Singularity vs SF thread, SF is almost never about prediction. Its about showing how people will react to major changes in science or society. Sure, there've been some lucky hits, and there are SF writers who enjoy extended infodumps, but that's not the point / not the goal.
With SF you're trying to capture the feel of ordinary life under new (to us) circumstances. The best SF ( short stories or novels, or award nominees) often read like ordinary books, just from very far away. As an example, the Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting the future of the US. But look how well it captured the look and feel of a country taken over by religious fundies (i.e. the Taliban).
For a much better take on what life might be like in the 2010's, read Stross's award nominated first story in his Accelerando set. At peak density one of his paragraphs contain more predictions than all of Sawyer's article, yet Lobsters also includes sensawunda. (sensawunda: hard to define, but its analogous to Chesterton's quote (my paraphrase): we shouldn't treat 'we can go to the moon' as being just as ordinary and boring as a telephone call. We should realize that being able to call anyone, anywhere in the world is as amazing as being able to go to the moon.)
Hard to capture a single quote, but for example (and this crowd):