Live-Blogging Christmas

Yeah, not happening. In fact, Mrs. TAE and I have a very busy Christmas schedule, and I cannot guarantee much blogging will occur at all.

However, as a teaser: over the next month I am going to explore futurist Ray Kurzweil's argument for a Technological Singularity, some current advances in biomedicine that imply a human-machine interface is approaching, as well as several government projects I have had my eye on that are researching better ways to link soldiers to computers.

Also, expect some coverage Android 2.0, I've been remiss to not mention Verizon's Droid and what it means for the iPhone.

Until we meet again, Happy Holidays! And remember: every snowflake is a fractal.


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Good Science Ideas

TAE holds that many of science's greatest ideas stem from earlier prophetic work in fiction. For example the DARPA challenge to build a powered exoskeleton actually contained a reference to Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" novel in the Funding Announcement. Or consider how many future-tech ideas Star Trek spawned...

And so I have to wonder: could the perceived lack of major innovation that has blanketed the globe over the last twenty years be caused by the inability of science fiction authors to dream up new dreams for actual scientists to invent?
Here we stand, watching terrorists hack into the video feeds of our unmanned aerial vehicles (which conjures up a James Cameron movie), and I realize that the highest tech we have right now is from mid-80's science fiction. Which makes me wonder what next?
As far as 90's science fiction goes, talk about a dry spell. While ST:TNG certainly was praiseworthy as a show, individual ideas in tech weren't all that populous. A few do come to mind, however. In one episode, Dr. Polaski puts a patient into suspended animation and encases them in "styrolite", in order to examine the subject without contaminating the crew.
Modern scientists are working on methods to "freeze" soldiers with sulfates to put them into suspended animation long enough to get them to a good surgical unit.

Really, the single largest tech theme of the TNG era was (IMHO) the Borg. The cybernetic supercolony. The Borg collective used advanced, unknown methods to join machine to man. Is this what the future holds for us, as outlined by our science prophets?
My guess would be yes. Portable electronics continue to gain ability, as well as catch up with their desktop cousins. How long before your "smartphone" becomes your computer? To do so, it'll need a much bigger interface. Like a heads up display, or instant projection. Which would necessitate body mounting.
And honestly, only a well-written translation code prevents us from talking directly with computers via electrical impulses. Really, the only reason you can't have a USB port implanted in your arm is because they haven't written the drivers for that yet.

And so there I think is where the next leap from "sci-fi" to "sci" is going: the integration of human with machine. And I'm not the first person to think this. Far from it. When I get my USB arm implant, I'll immediately begin downloading the whole of wikipedia! Except any articles about Joe Lieberman, those are banned from my mind forever.


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isn't there some health care thing going on?


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Global warming is such a hilariously bad name for it, anyway.

When we all go down, we go encased in ice.


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Reader Lunacy, Changing the Subject Edition

TPI votes for Denmark's energy policy by rebutting that their healthcare system is good:

I know it's very important for decent, patriotic Americans to look down on any country that has universal healthcare, good public higher education, and low energy consumption, but look--Denmark is a very free country with a vibrant economy, flexible labor markets, and better conditions for entrepreneurship than ours. Their unemployment is relatively low. They have high taxes but very, very high quality of life in basically every respect. It's better to be super-super-rich in America, but everyone who's not super-super-rich is better off under the Nordic social system.

I cannot remember my exact words, but I do not remember them being a criticism of Danish healthcare, education, labor markets, or environment of entrepreneurship. What I remember saying was that part of the way the Danes have enabled a greener society is by taxing the unholy hell out of any poor sucker who wants to drive his own car.

The core solutions to Denmark's green policy (180% registration tax on privately owned vehicles, for example) are not feasible in a world where freemarket capitalism rules the day.

What I am saying is that unlike TPI, who seems to believe that a conversion of American Democracy to Nordic Socialism would make the U.S. a better place, I am looking for solutions to the problems we face that would not impinge on the reckless way of life so many privileged Americans enjoy while also furthering American innovation and America's economy. Forgive my patriotism.

And "magic carbon death ray"? Excuse me. Did the Flying Spaghetti Monster tell you to type that? The carbon sequestration technologies I am proposing be investigated are not dream science like Iron Man's power supply or Star Trek warp nacelles, they are very real and very underfunded technologies that are already proposed and exist in laboratories and scientist's minds all over the globe. Artificial trees that grab CO2 out of the air, artificial photosynthesis baths, buildings with paint that contains active algae, nanoparticle catalysts pumped into the atmosphere that convert CO2 into CO that is easily turned into biodiesel, algae-based power plants, catalytic chemistry processes that turn CO2 into plastic shopping bags (and then turn the shopping bags into diesel fuel)...all of these are technologies that either have been tested in a tabletop setting or have been proposed with believable feasibility studies attached to them. All of these technologies (and many others) are frustratingly underfunded and will remain so as long as bright people like TPI consider them "magic."

If we are going to mix public health care into the environmental debate, let's do so both ways. TPI argues that my "carbon space race" is a waste of money, but consider this: the actual Space Race, you know, the one that spanned 18 years and put 6 manned missions on the Moon, the one where we invented completely new technology and physics, where a huge amount of difficulties were overcome and lives were lost, cost an estimated $143 billion of today's dollars. The CBO estimates that public health care would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $829 billion dollars. We should start pricing these things in a new unit of currency I shall call "Space Races." So the current health care legislation will cost about 6 Space Races. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost 10 Space Races. Our Federal deficit is around 12 Space Races.
So when I suggest we spend a few billion dollars (0.02 Space Races) on carbon sequestration research, or a commenter suggests a 10 million dollar (0.00006 Space Races) X-Prize for carbon capture technology, we are certainly not nearly in the ballpark of the CBO estimated cost for the health care legislation currently being discussed.

And that isn't even universal health care!

So while we are discussing "false dichotomies", perhaps we should turn the gun on its owner: calling my proposed carbon sequestration technology "magic" is a helluva thing to do when the savings Americans will somehow see via cheaper healthcare seems equally, if not more so, conjured by wizards from a fantasy novel.

TPI and I will never agree on some things, like how much my way of life should have to change to make the Earth a better place. But in the spirit of brotherly love, let my extend my hand: the United States must adopt, through some sort of strongly worded, enforceable legislation, an aggressive attempt at lowering the environmental impact its people are having on this planet. And in terms of healthcare and social welfare, I will admit: the citizens of this country are not doing enough to help one another out.


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NASA criticism of the day

NASA's 2.3 billion dollar Mars Science Laboratory, plagued with cost overruns, delays, and broken parts, apparently is supposed to test whether Mars may have been habitable in the past.

That's right: 2.3 billion dollars to find out if Mars could possibly have harbored life in the past.

Is there anyone, anywhere, who can give me a well-thought out explanation for why people cannot get clean water in Africa, and that water could be acquired for literally pennies per day per person, but we need to spend 2.3 billion dollars on a nuclear-powered titanium super-robot exploration rig to test if Mars may have had the potential to harbor life hundreds of millenia ago?
Please. I am sitting here shaking my head in rage that my hard-earned tax dollars are being funneled to Boeing and Friends to build a completely pointless robot instead of doing actual good like helping the needy or paying for body armor for soldiers who keep me safe.

Although I love tech, and ironically believe unmanned exploration of the solar system and galaxy is the only feasible way to go, pumping billions of tax dollars into a project whose sole purpose is to possibly turn a question mark into a period seems like a lot of people have their heads in the wrong place, or should I say up the wrong place. And a significant number of those people happen to be administrators at NASA.


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Reader Rebuttal

TPI in the comments of this post:

Prizes and carbon races and the like are all well and good, but I don't think you've taken the potential for reductions given current technology seriously enough. I was just hearing on the radio that Denmark has half the per-capita carbon emissions that we have. They're just as rich as we are (maybe a little richer) and they don't have any super magic technology that sequesters carbon. Surely we could get part of the way there by mimicing some policy choices other countries have already made?

That's right. Ignore the fact that Denmark has the highest electricity cost in the world, and ignore the fact that Danes pay the world's highest income tax rate, and instead wax poetic about their green energy (while ignoring the fact that the majority of electricity in Denmark comes from coal power plants).
And don't forget to skip over the fact that Denmark has the fortune of windy coasts (three times as windy as America's Gulf Coast), and that Denmark's government is very progressive in its climate policy.

Certainly, Denmark has adopted policies toward greenitude that the United States would be wont to ignore, like using high-efficienciy appliances and building materials, designing urbanscapes around mass transit, and progressive and renewable agricultural strategies. But many of their policies are rooted in (and enabled by) a culture and government that believes in the welfare state.
The core solutions to Denmark's green policy (180% registration tax on privately owned vehicles, for example) are not feasible in a world where freemarket capitalism rules the day.*

I want to own a Hummer HX someday. If only a few were made, so be it; I'll get so disgustingly wealthy I can buy one anyway. But when I own it, I want to drive down the street belching noxious fumes into the air with reckless aplomb, while eating McDonald's quarter pounders in the old fashioned styrofoam non-biodegradeable containers and sitting on leather seats (greatest song ever, lol). If our nation decides that carbon emissions are so terrible we must cap and/or reduce them, I may not achieve the dream of pushing traffic out of my way in my mega-vehicle.
But wouldn't it be more awesome if I could?! And to do that, while still seeking methods to clean the air, we must aggressively pursue methods to sequester carbon. It is easier to adapt to people's behaviors than it is to alter them.

Think of it in terms of digital cameras. What Denmark has done is create a country where hard drive space is abundant because no one uses digital cameras that take pictures above 5 megapixels, so that people's pictures never fill up hard drives. If someone wants to take six megapixel images, they pay a obscenely high tax before they can do so.
But here in the U.S. of A., we have 21.1 megapixel cameras. Hard drives keep getting bigger to store those massive, high quality image files. Should we adopt a strategy like the Danes, and force people to give up their 21 megapixel cameras to make the world of hard drives a better place? Or should we instead encourage innovation in hard drive technology, so that one day when the world craves 400 megapixel images, the hard drives are ready and waiting?


*Some of TAE's most beloved relatives have strong Danish backgrounds. I love the Danish people and do not want them to take this as an attack on them. I just loathe their societal structure.
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Physics

Well Thank God That's Finally Settled!


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Deep Thought on 3D Printers

Here at work we have an Objet Eden 250, which is basically the single most badass piece of equipment on Earth that can be owned for less than six figures. You just dump your 3D model into it and voila! several hours later you have a perfectly built plastic copy of your virtual model. Rapid prototyping never felt so good!

However (you knew the however was coming), the machine has this weird, government-like tendency to underestimate things. Typically when you start a print job, it tells you how many hours and how much modeling material it will use. Typically this turns out to be 20% shorter than the actual print time, and 5% less material than is used. I do not understand this at all.

That said, I am sitting here typing this while it builds intricate parts that no machinist could ever produce (and a 5-axis CNC would probably reject as impossible), without complaint. Of course, the parts were supposed to be done an hour ago...

...oh wait it just finished.
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Copenhagen Hypocrisy Watch, NASA edition

I don't really want to jump on the "look, they are getting nothing accomplished" bandwagon because they are getting something accomplished: they are stimulating the economy of Copenhagen.

Which leads me to my next point: is NASA merely a thinly veiled method the US government uses to stimulate the economy? Nearly 75% of their budget goes to private contract work, like building satellites, building components for the ISS, buying fuel for the shuttle fleet, buying parts for the shuttle fleet, paying private firms to perform R&D, etc etc. Only a small amount goes to pay the salaries of NASA employees and to maintain government owned facilities (and much of that maintenance is spent on private contractors).
So it could be easily argued that NASA's purpose is not to explore space but rather to stimulate the tech sector of this country.

Couple this with NASA's recent pledge to push for more space privatization, and you begin to see that NASA really doesn't have a purpose, other than to promote technology through tax dollar allocation.

I am not saying I have a problem with this; many high quality research firms receive much-needed funding from NASA; however many NASA projects (as I love to mention) are money-pits that cost ten to twenty times what they should, have ballooning timelines, and no real purpose other than to fill paragraphs in press releases.
If NASA is truly a means to explore space, then by all means, spend the money exploring space. But if NASA is a means to provide economic stimulus via technology spending, then they might as well close NASA and turn it into a government program like the NIH.


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Reader Comments, CO2 edition

A reader asks if I prefer innovative prizes or research grants to promote carbon sequestration and capture technologies.

The simple answer would be both. Let's throw everything we can at it.

But given the choice of one or the other, I disagree with the reader. Although innovative prizes, like the Ansari X-Prize seem really neat and do indeed promote innovation, they don't really enable the whole of the population access to innovate. In order to win the 10 million dollar X-Prize, Burt Rutan, Richard Branson and Paul Allen invested nearly 100 million dollars...not exactly a good investment. But for them the goal was more important than the cost.
However, not every researcher or organization could enter such a contest, as they simply don't have the capital to fund such an effort. And so it became a race of three or four organizations with capital to achieve the goal. Not exactly a wide-fielded effort.

Conversely, if we spend in terms of research grants, it enables researchers with really good ideas, but no capital, to get small grants to get data, which will enable them to get larger grants, which will translate into tech-transfer grants, which turn into products. The government, in this case, becomes a venture capitalist. Saying this works better is an understatement because rather than having a huge majority of the intellectual property owned by scheming venture capitalists, the government acts more like an angel investor, and doesn't even ask for its investment back (rather it assumes it will receive it down the chain in tax revenue).
Of course, grant-based investment does have its issues, as I have touched on before, like the propensity of the buddy-system, where researchers butter up and lobby funding sources like DARPA to fund projects long after they dead-end, or the tendency for universities to hoard grant dollars that, having been earned by the professor that wrote the grant, should be spent by him/her. Or the tendency for administrative overhead costs to eat huge chunks out of a grant.

Nevertheless, if we want to foster an atmosphere where any poor kid with a genuinely good idea can make it big (and not be owned by his financiers), then I have to believe research-grant-based investment in carbon sequestration and capture technologies is the way to go.


Disclaimer: TAE's employer primarily funds its research through government grant sources.
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Monogamy vs. Biology, Ctd.

A reader asserts:

Our closest extant relatives are polygamous, so how can we know that our species was designed for monogamy? I'm not disputing anthropological evidence for monogamy, I just think it's probably more of a cultural than a biological development.

This is true for humans. But what needs to be made clear is that by "cultural development" we are talking about ancient (tens of thousands of years ago) humans, not modern cultural humans. We are talking about the behavior patterns that emerged at the same time our species emerged as unique. You cannot separate our species rise and monogamy, the two are clearly interrelated: humans needed long training periods, tons of nutrition, and helplessness at birth to clear their large heads from the birth canal in order to grow up in to smart, omnivorous, efficient, killing machines. That kind of adolescence required two attentive parents, as well as a close family group. Many anthropologists argue that the greatest attribute that contributed to humanity's rise was that grandparents lived long enough to aid in the family unit's food-gathering.

What isn't true is that modern cultural development has promoted monogamy. On the contrary, since the development of agriculture, our species has widely strayed from monogamy, as caste systems of various sorts emerged. Modern monogamy is really a product of modern ethics, not biology.

And to the reader I rebut: our closest relatives are not polygamous, but rather polygynous, which I believe is what you are arguing, not polygamy.
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Wired to Cheat?

TPI points to Dan Savage suggesting that the human race is not wired for monogamy.

Science tells us otherwise. Matt Ridley, amongst others has argued and pointed to evidence that the rise of our species on this planet only happened because of loving, monogamous pairs. The argument is this: If a male human has multiple female partners, he will (on average) have multiple children with them. This increases his odds of producing successful progeny. However, because of the long gestational time and adolescence of human children, if they do not have adequate nutrition they are at a significant risk to not survive. Malnourished children grow up to be small adults who might not fare well in the caste of the clan. So this polygamous father has a handful of weakling children who cannot compete with the children of monogamous fathers for a mate, and die.
Conversely, if a father devotes himself entirely to a single female and her offspring, he can not only time when his children are born through menstrual cycles, but also have a hand in their education and learning, and is better able to provide nutrition. Healthy children = bigger, smarter children, which means the father is more likely to become a grandfather before he dies at the ripe old age of 35.

There is other evidence as well. Anthropologists suggest that males, competing for females, learned to walk upright in order to carry treasures with them to tempt the females.
Other evidence exists as well, elsewhere in the animal kingdom. There is a linear correlation between a species longevity and the level of polygamy, in that polygamy drops in longer-lived species.

But perhaps the best - and most parallel in today's society - evidence that monogamous relationships have existed in our species since it emerged is this simple trump: what guarantee does a male have that while he is away from his home spreading his seed to other females some other male is visiting his home doing the same? Our species is so wily, most anthropologists agree that the only guarantee a male had that his progeny was his own (especially considering that tribes shared visible traits like hair and eye color) was to stick with his female and her alone; if for no other reason than to prevent another male breeding with his female.

No, our species was monogamous since its inception, polygamy is not a human trait, it is something that has become possible only in the guiled veil of civilization and the caste system we have lived in since Hammurabi's Code of Laws.


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The Unsettling Carbon Conundrum

Last week I had a back and forth about Climategate, and where exactly I, and everyone else, should stand on carbon emissions.

While I made my point clear that it seems like humanity is doing a great job of wrecking the Earth at dangerous rate, and while I don't see much reason to doubt anthropogenic climate change, the recent slowdown in Earth's temperature rise, combined with the dubious and often unintelligible results from climate studies has made me, and many others, ponder what exactly to do about all this carbon dioxide.

As the thoughts ran through my head, and as I spent a long weekend thinking about little else, I've been struck by how much I dislike capping carbon emissions. This seems, even to me, illogical and against my better nature; I am a treehugging liberal and vehemently oppose most of the things the humans on this planet do. Our species is unique in that it is upward swinging population explosion a predator achieves when the prey population far exceeds the predator population. Predator-prey populations typically flow in sinusoidal curves slightly out of phase with one another: as the prey population rises, after a delay, the predator population rises. When the prey population peaks (at the ecological limit) the predator population eventually catches up, and the prey population begins to decline. This decline in prey then slowly causes a decline in predator population, until a point when the prey are sufficiently sparse that they can no longer be negatively predated. Then the predator population finishes its dip and starts to recover when the prey population starts its climb once again...
Humans, on the other hand, are the first species on this planet (at least since the Cambrian Extinction) to be a predator species to have a wide berth of prey. Typical superpredators are carnivorous, but humanity is omnivorous, and that has given us the rare gift of being able to eat the prey, as well as the prey's food!
In any case, our population, for all intents and purposes, is a predator climbing a runaway population curve, only the prey curve is the total biomass of the entire planet.

So the question faced by all these scientists who are dithering in Copenhagen (when not riding around in limos) shouldn't be whether we need to reduce carbon emissions, but rather what will be the effects if we don't. If they really want to convince us that we need to change our behavior (I'm not convinced on carbon emissions), then they need to give us believeable, peer-reviewed data and outlays describing what it will cost us. They need to explain exactly where the CO2 is going, and how much more exactly the atmosphere can tolerate.
Telling us to cap emissions really does nothing because we are not at a point where the effects of CO2 are readily noticeable. Telling us to quit hunting bluefin tuna makes sense; the scarcity of tuna in the Mediterranean and southern Pacific Ocean is very noticeable. It's not like if everyone stopped emitting CO2 for a week the sky would turn hyperblue and be filled with California Condors!

However, as I mentioned last week, I don't think I am a fan of reducing carbon emissions. Not just because I enjoy my posh lifestyle in my warm, Midwestern apartment, and not just because I drive a gas-guzzling pickup truck, and not just because it would hurt the U.S. economy.
It is patently clear to anyone with a good search engine that the developing nations of the world are driving their economic and social development with coal. In China, coal planets open weekly, and in India a similar situation is occurring.
Indeed, in many developing nations, smoggy streets filled with junky cars is the norm, and the alternative is not exactly idyllic. Who am I to look down from my high horse of comfort and ease and tell people who barely get by that they need to do better, for my children's sake?

However, the treehugger liberal in me is screaming that we can't keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, it isn't natural. CO2 levels are nearing an all-time high for recorded history (going back billions of years), and show no sign of slowing.

So perhaps I am right, perhaps the solution is not to cap carbon, but to utilize it! A while back I suggested that we need a new Space Race, but we need to stop having space races that actually are concerned with space. I further that suggestion with this: we need a Carbon Race.

I propose the government devote significant resources to developing methods to sequester and harvest CO2 that is artificially produced. The goal of the methods would be to completely eliminate CO2 produced by a power plant, or a farm, or a manufacturing facility.
A whole new market could emerge, and a whole new breed of innovator/scientist, radically developing ways to decrease artificial CO2.

In case I get any flak for this let me suggest a parallel: seatbelts. Faced with a planet rapidly filling with high-velocity steel projectiles that had the propensity to crash into one another and kill people, the government made a smart move: instead of banning auto-mobiles, they instead mandated the seatbelt, then the airbag. Car fatalities plunged, and are at an all-time low. While driving, on the other hand, is at a peak.
Couldn't we do the same with CO2? Why cap the growth of industries that emit foul gasses when instead we could create new foul gas markets and jobs in a whole new foul gas industry?


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Quote for the Day

"I don't know. I'm not an engineer. You ask me, and I say we can do anything. But you have to push the envelope."

Colonel Eric Mathewson, on the capabilities of a secret unmanned aerial vehicle spotted in Kandahar.


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Bizarre Spiralling Light in the Sky

I wish this were aliens. I really do. First Contact is a philosophical dream. Imagine the Catholic Church trying to reconcile the existence of extraterrestrial life with their own Earth-centrism. Or imagine people like me, who are anti-human-presence-in-space, having to eat our words as the aliens took us on sightseeing jaunts across the galaxy. Or imagine the philosophers, writing about existence, having to rethink human consciousness given that non-human consciousness clearly exists!
Now, the fact that the aliens would most likely be here to wipe us out is another issue.


h/t Bob.
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Deep Thought on Polar Bears

If Sarah Palin is to be believed*, then the inability for Alaskans to shoot polar bears would put an "irreversible hurt" on Alaska's economy.

Exactly how much revenue does polar bear hunting net?




*Sarah Palin is not to be believed.


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Deep Thought on Health Care

If only I had a dollar for everytime someone has said "now that the public option is dead"...


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Weight Loss

When I heard Tom Daly had lost 115 pounds, my first thought was "wow." Then I thought, maybe this is just the motivation I need to lose 115 pounds as well. Starting today, I'm on a strict diet and exercise regimen and I won't stop until I've lost the 115 pounds I don't need. The plan is to lose 5 pounds a week for the next 23 weeks, so by summer I am a svelte 40 lbs.

...wait a second.
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Copenhagen Environmental Hypocrisy Watch!

1200 limousines, 140 private planes and climbing for the climate change summit. It is believed that so many private jets will be arriving that the airport will become clogged, and private jets will fly in, drop off their "VIPs", and then fly to a nearby airport to park. It is reported that the delegates will be eating caviar wedges.

As for our President, he'll be taking Air Force One, a decoy 747, and a couple fighter jets as escort.

"According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough. "

Paragons of hypocrisy.


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TAE's Holiday Gift Guide

Without further ado, I present The Abstracted Engineer's 2009 Holiday Gift Guide!

1. The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose. A well-thought out argument that human consciousness is non-logarithmic, thereby making it impossible for standard computers to successfully imitate the human psyche. Good reading for any cerebral dork.

2. Mututoyo Digital Calipers, via McMaster-Carr. Probably the single greatest tool in the history of ever, the digital caliper is like a hyper-accurate ruler on steroids. No engineer can exist without one.

3. A dozen neodymium super magnets via United Nuclear. Your engineer will squeal with joy when you present him with a half a dozen of these, and tell him to go the garage and not come back until he's built a rail gun.

4. Kickin' Bot: An Illustrated Guide to Building Combat Robots, by Grant Imahara. Grant is the well known smart kid on Mythbusters. Whenever the Mythbuster team needs something requireing brainpower to build, they turn to Grant. He also won the Discovery Channel show "Battle 'Bots". His how-to guide is fun reading.

5. 9480WK Breadboard, via Amazon. I can only imagine the world in which Tesla had one of these handy, to build his free-energy car or his death ray.

6. A Hummer HX, for that engineer going through a mid-life crisis.

7. Tickets to see a Japanese fluorescent light fight. I kid you not.

8. Alienware Area 51 ALX desktop. Dell's version of Lexus is Alienware, where you can buy obscenely expensive desktops for your engineer who likes gaming. See gift 9 for a better gift idea, however.

9. Gift card to Newegg.com to buy all the components in the Alienware Area 51 ALX at half the price and build it him/herself. Nothing says "I love my engineer" like enabling their lust to assemble components into a working...something. And better than paying ridiculous overhead at Alienware, you can get a full list of the ALX's components and let your engineer build the same thing...or give the engineer a gift card equal the cost of the ALX, and see how obscenely powerful of a computer they can create.
Warning: a computer that expensive, bought and assembled from parts from Newegg, will probably obtain consciousness and try to take over the planet. Scratch that, see gift idea #1.

10. And least but certainly not least: this wins the all-time "why didn't I think of that" award. Get one in English and one in metric. And then throw away that disorganized box of sockets, the socket strips hanging on your pegboard, etc. and enjoy a clutter-free life.


Disclosure: none of the provided links will make me any money, hot-linking to Amazon implies a bias (READ THIS GLENN REYNOLDS YOU VAMPIRE) and so I do not do it. These are honest, real links without my personal gain (other than that I want someone to buy me these things).

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Reader Rebuttal

A reader writes:

Whoa whoa whoa! whats happening here? Is that CO2 crow you're eating? how does it taste?You cant go from being a flaming liberal greeny and completely flop without explanation on the CO2 issue.

This caught me off guard, especially since I wasn't aware I had flip-flopped on CO2 at all. So I went back and reviewed what I had written. The sentence to which I assume the reader is referring is this one:

And really, is CO2 even that bad? Climategate has shown us that there is a very real possibility that scientists aren't completely sure about the long term effects (and cause) of rising CO2 levels.

Now I can understand how this seems a flipflop, and for that I apologize. But although I acquiesce that climate scientists have potentially not been entirely empirical with their data, that does not mean I personally think that the case for anthropogenic Earth-destruction has been weakened. As I ranted here, there are innumberable other examples of humans desecrating this globe like Godzilla in Tokyo. And personally, I think we have been belching an ignoble and sickening amount of gaseous death into our own air. All I was suggesting was that setting some sort of CO2 cap, and/or forcing reductions with no well established incentives other than idealist bullshit, limits both capitalism as well as innovation.
Better, I believe, is a world where businesses can (semi-) recklessly spew whatever they want into the air but busy and ingenius engineers have devised methods to not only capture that airborne waste, but to profitably utilize it.

Arbitrarily setting some sort of CO2 "point" above which a country cannot go does no one any favors, not even Earth.


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SHUT UP! post of the day

Has anyone ever heard of "deionized water?" It's basically water that chemists and scientists use that has all the elements found in tap water, like calcium, fluoride, (lead), and any microbial life taken out of it. You can also get super-pure DI water, which is literally H2O with a guarantee of nothing else in it.
If you let DI water sit in a sterile container in your garage for one trillion years, there would still not be anything in your DI water.

So every time I read yet another article about "liquid water found on (insert celestial object here)", I just roll my eyes. There is a reason life evolved in the "primordial ooze", not in the "primordial purified water."


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Pandering to my readers.

As requested.


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Capping emissions

Deep thought: liberals want legalization of marijuana because of individual liberty, and government savings via reduced anti-drug spending. They often argue that government tax revenue could be gained via open-market sales of marijuana, and that really, alcohol is much worse. We've been over this.
But with the biggest climate meeting since Kyoto about to start, I have to ask: how can they (liberal weiners) expect reduced carbon emissions? Because limiting carbon emissions will hurt businesses, make no mistake. And the government will spend a fortune policing carbon emissions nationwide. And corruption will invariably occur, as businesses cut corners to maintain liquidity, or ignore the emissions requirements completely. And really, is CO2 even that bad? Climategate has shown us that there is a very real possibility that scientists aren't completely sure about the long term effects (and cause) of rising CO2 levels.

And so I see this weird duality to their thinking: marijuana should be legal, but CO2 shouldn't.

Here's my solution: rather than capping (or even reducing) CO2 emission levels, instead we should subsidize and encourage "carbon farming" or any practice where a person's trade is literally to convert CO2 into a compact disposable material. For example, a small, well-run algae farm might convert 2,000 tons of CO2 into oxygen and hydrocarbons every year. Or a deep-sea miner could deposit CO2 into the deep ocean as a side-business. Or an intrepid scientist could develop a photovoltaic nanorobot that catalytically (using photon energy) broke the double bond between carbon and oxygen in CO2 and created hydrocarbons in a cascade (artificial photosynthesis, essentially).
All these trades could be wildly encouraged, and any great idea on how to dispose of nightmarishly-huge (Godzillions of tons) of CO2 would be pursued. Instead of limiting the GDP of our nation by capping business' CO2, instead we'd increase the GDP by creating a whole new set of businesses. And that would lead to tax revenue from those businesses, plus jobs, and tax revenue from those jobs, plus sales, and tax revenue from the sales...what's not for a liberal to love?!

And the best part is, as CO2 emissions rise like a fighter jet, so too would the business of carbon farming. We'd essentially solve the CO2 problem the most profitable way possible. I envision vast swamps of goopy, churning algae, belching hideous bubbles of clean oxygen, and occasionally a thin layer of hydrocarbon (read: biodiesel) is skimmed off the surface.

Why cap emissions, when instead we could use them?


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Enough with the drug talk. Agree to disagree I guess.


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The "War on Drugs"

I was asked in the comments to address the war on drugs and the potential waste of money created by it. The implication is that somehow the government would save money if they legalized marijuana because that would eliminate some "war on drugs" spending.

You know what else would decrease War on Drugs spending? If people stopped doing drugs. We could also cut medicare costs by not covering lung cancer. Or we could cut medicare costs by encouraging people to quit smoking.


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More on Marijuana

TPI responds to my post:

I think it's entirely legitimate to have a strong--though not absolute--presumption in favor of liberty. Heroin would quite reasonably exceed what that presumption allows...

I guess what I don't understand is how this isn't a slippery slope? I think skydiving is safe but not marijuana. Therefore in my mind obviously skydiving should be unregulated, but marijuana should. TPI thinks marijuana is safe, but not heroin. Therefore in his mind marijuana should be legalized but not heroin. So based on the argument that because TPI and a lot of other people feel this way about marijuana, therefore it is okay to legalize it?
What about the lobby of people who think heroin is safe compared to methamphetamines? And then the group who finds methamphetamines safer than playing Russian Roulette? Doesn't legalization of marijuana basically admit a gradual loosening (liberals get giddy at this) of restrictions, in a gradual slide towards legalization of everything, even things that are clearly a threat to society? And how does TPI (and Sullivan, and others) justify their view of marijuana as safe, but people who believe in legalization of "harder" drugs aren't right that their drugs should be legal?

It seems like the go to argument for pro-legalization types is "but alcohol is legal and worse for you" or "guns are legal and worse for you," and they claim, as TPI fairly does, that guns kill more people than pot does. But people who die from cirrhosis of the liver via alcoholism would have died from poisoning of their mind via marijuana, if the same amount of drug abuse had been rendered. And saying that legal guns justified legal anything else is backwards logic: guns kill more people than anal sex with horses...should we legalize anal horse sex? Guns kill more people than flying a couple airplanes into a pair of high-rise commercial office buildings...should we legalize flying planes into high-rise buildings? Obviously not.
All this does is circle right back around to my original argument: that in a perfect world we wouldn't have to regulate anything, because everyone is smart enough to make good choices.

So in this imperfect world, where I might have someone make a poor choice and break in to my home and threaten my family, I'd much rather have a handgun to protect my daughter than a baggie of cannabis.

And let's be serious here. My single biggest problem with marijuana is that the majority of users I know primarily enjoy it for the escape it gives them from their real life. A gun does not offer that (in a practical, non-suicidal sense). I admire the human mind above any other object in the known universe, and it fundamentally sickens me that people willingly want to alter their minds in unknown, semi-permanent ways.
Now, there may be a good argument for widening legalization of medically-applicable marijuana, as it does have certain health benefits for terminally ill patients. But you don't see polls debating whether or not codeine should be available over-the-counter!

And though I admire TPI's courage for admitting previous use of marijuana in his younger days, I have to ask him: you have one of the finest minds I have ever known. Do you really want to risk harming it with psychoactive drugs? Can you absolutely confirm that marijuana doesn't have lasting effects? Is it an opportunity cost worth taking? And although you have had the resolve to stop, what exactly do you think will keep your son from being influenced by a future marijuana lobby that almost exclusively targets children in their advertising campaigns (get em hooked while they're young, they'll be yours for life)?
For me, I think less about my world, and more about the world into which my daughter will grow. And pot seems less like a fun, safe addition to a party and more like Aldous Huxley's Soma.


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Wikipedia Article of the Day

Lake Wobegone Effect:

For driving skill, almost all of the US sample (93%) and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%. For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.

The lower someone’s IQ, the more likely he is to rate himself as more intelligent than those around him. Conversely, people with a high IQ, while better at appraising others' intelligence overall, are still likely to rate people of similar intelligence as themselves as having higher IQs.

The disparity between actual IQ and perceived IQ has also been noted between genders by British psychologist Adrian Fuhrman. Men are prone to overestimate their intelligence by around 5 points while women are likely to underestimate their IQ by a similar proportion.

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Reader Comments

A reader writes:

Dear [TAE],
We thought your weekly devotional piece was outstanding! I just finished running off a copy for my houseguest from Tulsa, OK who had asked me this morning about what the Christian Church believes and what I thought about evolution only. I said I believe in both evolution and intelligent design and had her read your piece off my computer. Then I ran her off a copy along with the SACC "what we believe" info on the website.
She was impressed with your credentials and so are we.
...
Your devotional was on a difficult and complex subject and was so well written.
Thank you for writing it. As my friend just said: we have a brain so we should use it!

(my italics)

Amen.


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Reader Rebuttal

TPI writes:

I mean, you're the libertarian here. People should be generally free to do stuff, so long as it isn't damaging to society, right?

I guess I'm libertarian? I hate the stigma of the title, though.

In TAE's perfect world, everything dangerous is legal, but everyone is smart enough to avoid dangerous stuff. Cocaine is perfectly legal and available on the open market (allowing tax revenue) but no one is dumb enough to inhale/inject/whatever it is you do with cocaine. Dynamite is also legal, but no one is angry enough to buy a truckload of it and blow up a building. Prostitution is legal, but no woman is at a point where she'll sell her body for money, and no man is at a point where he's so desperately horny that he'd pay for it. Gambling is legal everywhere, but people are prudent enough to not gamble with their money. Abortion is legal, but teenage girls don't get themselves pregnant, women are not raped, and birth control is used by any and all who wish to time their children effectively.
In my impossibly utopia, all is well and all are free. But we all make smart choices and we all take care of our bodies.

Back here in reality, we hardly make any smart choices. In fact most of our choices are terrible. Drug abuse is widespread, across all cultural lines, and abortion is a cauterizing hot button issue, both for people who fight for it and for those who argue against it. People still cover themselves in explosives and run into mosques, or murder their peers at military bases, or fight holy wars against each other. Prostitution and gambling are widespread and an unprecendented cultural phenomenon.

I'd love to say "sure, legalize pot...no one will abuse it" but the fact is that a lot more people would have access to it that are weak-willed than currently do while pot is an illegal substance.

Libertarians do not argue for the deregulation of everything, ever. Or if they do they are pointlessly idealistic. Instead, libertarians argue for the absolute safe minimum amount of government intrusion or regulation, especially into areas where no intrusion and regulation is necessary. In the case of motorcyclists wearing helmets and addictive drugs, absolutely the government should be involved, because enough people in our society do not have the personal fortitude to make the right decision regarding these dangerous things for it to be open and widespread.


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"Leaving the Right"

I wish I had time to write about Sullivan's manifesto he published yesterday. It was really pathetic. I just wish I could find someone who didn't smoke pot (nor wanted to) that was for the legalization of it. My gut feeling is that there are almost zero people of that inclination.

Pot smokers argue for legalization the way a torturer would argue for torture legalization: hey, lots of people do it, and you can't prove it's really that bad, and there are worse things, so why not?

I love reading Sullivan, he's a good conservative and smart about politics. But his pro-pot stance befuddles me, and I can only surmise that he is pro-pot because he enjoys it personally.


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Scientists grow meat in a laboratory

So basically they made gooey pork with no texture? I'm afraid that has already been invented.


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NASA criticism of the day

Turns out a meteorite that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago has crystals in it that contain magnetite which scientists said in 1996 was possibly the fingerprint of ancient Martian bacteria. Now they have reexamined the rock (at taxpayer's expense) and determined that they are still sure that the crystals possibly hint at ancient Martian bacterial life.
Combine this with recent evidence that there is possibly frozen water on the Moon...oh wait, the Moon and Mars are completely different places. I suddenly forgot.

Although the search for extraterrestrial life is a mission I believe we should undertake, I have to ask what the priorities are. Should we continue studying Mars for ancient microbial (but now extinct) creatures? Or should we concentrate on distant stars that may have higher, intelligent life similar to our own? Does the existence (or non-existence) of past life on Mars affect whether or not the place should be colonized or terraformed?

And here's my deepest question of all: how does a chunk of Mars, containing crystalline bacterial fossils, exit Mars' gravitational field, get caught in Earth's gravitational field, fall to Earth without burning up or exploding in the atmosphere, survive the last Ice Age, and then be discovered by scientists who can ably identify the rock as Martian in origin?

Through the wondrous power of the internet, I have found an article, dated Feb 1999, which explains the theory that the Martian rock was "thrown off" Mars surface during the impact of a large object with Mars, some 16 million years ago.

But that doesn't explain to me how we know these are actually Mars rocks. Luckily, there is an article written in the 1980's (see bibliography of this review) that suggests the chemical composition of a handful of meteorites, along with the noble gases contained therein, virtually eliminate any other source from the equation. These meteorites are from Mars.

Because all meteorites come from the inner solar system? Oh wait, no, they don't.

TAE humbly submits that there is no compelling reason to believe that these rocks originated at Mars and not another extrasolar body with Mars-like geology.

Nevertheless, I must again ask one of my earlier questions: if now-extinct microbial life once existed on Mars, does it matter to taxpayers? Although I find the search for extraterrestrial life compelling and worthwhile, because contact with (or even simply positive evidence of) intelligent life would change the fundamentals of human existence...I do not see how proof of "nanobacteria" on Mars, dead for over a billion years, could ever possibly change my life. And so why should I pay taxes to fund scientists scamming scanning Martian meteorites with multi-million dollar microscopes?


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More football talky talk

What are the chances of New Orleans and Indianapolis reaching the Super Bowl, both undefeated? Would that not be the most epic game in all of football history? They won't play each other until the Super Bowl, if that is what you were wondering. New Orleans' remaining 5 games only feature one team with playoff potential (Dallas) and only two teams above .500 (Atlanta is at an impressive .545). Indianapolis' remaining five games all feature teams at 6-5 or worse, except struggling Denver, at 7-4. It is very possible for both these teams to win their remaining games! And then win their conferences during the playoffs and meet at the Super Bowl, both 18-0. It's a long shot, I agree, what with teams typically resting starters once home-field advantage is clinched. But it is possible.


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TAE, prophet

Here, I predicted that Charlie Weis would get fired and would be the new offensive coordinator of the Kansas City Chiefs, and here it is reported that Kansas City coach Todd Haley used to share a cubicle with Weis at the New York Jets, and would consider Weis for the KC OC job at the end of the season.

Here, I suggested that a computer simulation of a biological brain is pointless, unless a hardware method can be developed that will better simulate the anatomy and physiology of the brains' neurons. Here, Jonah Lehrer says that computer simulations of the brain are pointless unless hardware (or much more advanced software) can be developed that will better simulate the structure and interconnectivity of the brain.

Side note: coaches of big schools with successful programs, heed my warning: the Notre Dame coaching spot is not desirable. Just ask George O'Leary.
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