Monthly Archives: July 2003

The Village Voice on Transhumanism

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The Village Voice has an extended look at last month’s World Transhumanist Association held at Yale. The author hits briefly on the Singularity, nanotech, and all of the rest of the transhumanist panapoly. But what attracted my attention was this quote from Bill McKibben,

I go straight to the question of why on earth we would want to do this in first place. I’ve been unable to come up with an answer. All of this enhancing and souping up presupposes a goal or an aim. What is that goal? What is it we’re not intelligent enough to do now? It’s not to feed the hungry—that has to do with how we share things. Fighting disease? We’re making steady progress in conventional medical science with the brains that we have right now. There are a thousand reasons not to trade in people, as we have known them throughout human history, for something else.

I can envision McKibben’s distant ancestors lecturing anyone who will listen,

What good is this whole agriculture thing for? What is the goal? Who needs this? We’ve been hunting and gathering for thousands of years, why switch now?

People want to transcend humanity because it is one of the most deep-seated desires in most human beings. This is usually expressed in the context of religion in which such transcendce occurs after death. Transhumanists want to avoid the whole “wait until you die” version of transcendence and instead transform themselves and others into something more than human in this universe.

A major theme of the last 10,000 years is of human beings increasingly exerting control over both themselves and their environment. Transhumanism is simply the logical extension of that in the face of the often bewildering pace of technological change.

On one end of the spectrum, McKibben rejects technological change, complaining that we are in danger of leaving the “natural world” (whatever that means) behind. On the other, transhumanism says “bring it on,” betting that the pace of technological change will continue to accelerate until what comes next becomes inherently unpredictable (the Singularity) and that this will be a very good thing.

Vietnam Casualties

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This weblog is rightly criticizing Washington Times columnist Jack Kelly for Kelly’s racist dig at Arabs,

The North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies were bright, skilled, resourceful, well-led, and very brave.

In Iraq, we’re fighting Arabs.

Kelly is also one of many people who do not appear to understand commonly touted statistics about deaths in the Vietnam theater,

In Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives. At the height of the war, 500 soldiers were being killed each week.

In the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation, we have lost fewer men to hostile fire than in a single terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. We’ve been losing about a soldier a day since the first of June. At this rate, we’ll reach the Vietnam total in about 158 years.

Sorry, but no. The 58,000 figure is of combat and non-combat deaths in the Vietnam theater. If you’re going to use that statistic, then you need to compare it with total combat and non-combat deaths in Iraq (which, the last time I checked, sat at about two deaths per day).

The level of violence in Iraq is still extremely low — I get the feeling that your average L.A. street gang would be more vicious than these rather ineffective holdout Saddam loyalists. As Kelly points out in another part of his colum, the suicide bombers who attacked the Marine compound in Lebanon killed more Americans in one fell swoop than these jokers in Iraq have been able to do since the beginning of the war.

Not very impressive, except perhaps to the media who seem to find a annual death rate of less than 1 per 100,000 in a war zone to be indicative of enormous problems.

Installing a Desktop Wiki

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A couple months ago I wrote about installing Movable Type on my laptop to do some personal knowledge management. Movable Type might be a great weblogging tool, but it really didn’t work well for what I was trying to use (largely because it wasn’t designed to).

So today I downloaded and installed SnipSnap, a Wiki/Weblog tool. That was more like it.

I wouldn’t use one to manage a web site, but I love the way that a Wiki turns the browser into a sort of canvas for adding and connecting information.

BuyMusic Apparently *Really* Sucks

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In response to my previous post about problems with Buy Music, Greg Pierce points out this ArsTechnica article pointing out that BuyMusic.Com is even worse than I had originally thought.

Apple did the smart thing and negotiated the same rights deal with the various companies it dealt with. On the one hand, this has meant that its music store doesn’t include some artists. BuyMusic negotiated different rights deals with different companies in order to increase the number of tracks it could sell, but also making it ridiculously complex for users to track exactly what they’re getting for their money,

different songs/albums carry different use restrictions. Using DRM, publishers can put limitations on how many times you can download a file, burn it to a CD, and put it on a SDMI-compliant player. Browsing around I found that most songs/albums had unlimited burns and player transfers, with one (initial download). But if you want to buy the latest album by Audioslave, be prepared to put up with only 5 burns and 5 transfers. Some music can’t be burned or transferred to a player at all!

Not only would that be a nightmare to track, but come on — I can only transfer some tracks to a portable device a limited number of times. How stupid is that restriction?

As ArsTechnica points out, the whole BuyMusic moniker borders is deceptive since you can’t actually buy any music from the site. Instead, as its user agreement puts it,

All downloaded Content is sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement.

That sounds like a Monty Python routine.

A Really Private File Sharing Network

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CNN has a story on the obvious way to route around the RIAA lawsuits against Napster, Kazaa, etc. — smaller, private file sharing networks.

These private file-swapping networks have surfaced just as the music industry has been granted dozens of subpoenas seeking the names of those who trade copyrighted material on popular services such as Kazaa, Imesh, and Gnutella.

The private networks are open to smaller groups of perhaps 20 to 30 people who liberally share music, television shows, movies and computer programs. Members of such networks believe they can avoid legal consequences because their identities and actions are masked with the same technology used to protect online credit card transactions.

Why not just take this idea a step further? A 200mb external hard drive goes for about $330 or less these days. Find five or 6 friends, put up $60 or $70 apiece, have someone partition the hard drive into separate areas for each individual, and then mail the hard drive across the country from one friend to the next.

Much higher bandwidth (this would be an excellent way to deal with large video files), more files, nobody sniffing packets looking for illegal activities. What’s not to love?

BuyMusic Apparently Sucks

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Apparently BuyMusic.Com is a less than enjoyable experience,

First problem. After you buy an album, you need to download it. Sure, I knew that. What I didn’t know is that you have to download EACH SONG INDIVIDUALLY. One click per song. With two large sized albums with many songs on it – it can be just a LITTLE annoying.

Ok. We’re compromising, right? I’ll suck it up and deal.

After all the songs downloaded, I tried to play them. Second problem. Before each song plays – it has to download and verify your license. You can’t mulitple select a bunch and do this. You need to do this before EACH SONG will play. [Edited to add: "Verifing your license" means another window pops up that asks for your buymusic login and password... you enter it... it thinks awhile... it thinks some more... Then it comes back and says click "play" to actually play the song...]

Gee, why don’t they just make you install a dongle to your PC while they’re at it. Then again, these are the same folks who thought they’d attract me to their service by taking out full page ads featuring loser/wife beater Tommy Lee.

I have no idea whether or not BuyMusic.Com is a useful service. Every time I try to visit their home page I get a message saying,

In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com’s offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.

L. Brent Bozell at His Worst

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It’s people like L. Brent Bozell III who pretty much prevent me from ever characterizing myself as a conservative. Frankly I agree a lot of the time with the Media Research Center, but then Bozell goes off with stuff like this criticizing Bravo’s recent spate of homosexual-oriented programming,

Such programming “may be acceptable for that element in our culture that’s already earning an advanced degree in Sin Acceptance,” he wrote. “But it’s also acceptable to the gang at NBC, and the suits upstairs at General Electric?”

Sin Acceptance? Ugh. Look, I just want lower taxes so I can better afford my sinful cable bill. All that social conservative nonsense is so 1982.

Source:

Gay-Themed TV Gains a Wider Audience. Bernard Weinraub and Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, July 29, 2003

From My Blog to John Leo’s Column

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Update:

After I wrote this, John Leo sent me a nice e-mail apologizing for not citing me. As I responded to him, this article was actually written semi-tongue-in-cheek. I realize that professional journalists don’t always have time to track down who was the first to point out this or that error.

Henry Hanks sent me an e-mail today alerting me that John Leo had picked up my report about the BBC’s convenient editing of stories at its web site.

Leo writes,

The BBC, probably the most relentlessly anti-American organization in Britain, recently altered a transcript of one of its own stories, thus misquoting itself. The story dealt with Park Jong-lin, a 70-year-old veteran of the Korean War who “served in the North Korean army fighting against the imperialist American aggressors and their South Korean accomplices.” In the altered version quote marks now surround “imperialist American aggressors” and the BBC’s reference to “accomplices” was changed to “allies.”

Prediction: Because Internet bloggers now watch the wayward BBC carefully, more touched-up transcripts will come to light. The BBC, by the way, falsely reported the Jessica Lynch rescue as a made-for-TV special faked with U.S. soldiers firing blanks for the cameras. (Change that transcript!)

This is the fourth or fifth time something I’ve blogged about here has wound its way into a national story which is kind of cool. But come John, if bloggers are doing such a good service how about throwing us a little love with a link or at least a mention when you incorporate our scoops into your column?

I’ll even make it a quid pro quo and promise to always link to your column when I incorporate parts of it into my blogging.

Source:

Mangled quotes take on a life of their own. John Leo, Universal Press Syndicate, July 27, 2003.

Family Reunion Time

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This weekend Lisa and I went to the family reunion of my father’s family. Okay, family reunions probably aren’t that big of a deal to most people, but due to the odd circumstances that followed after my parents’ divorce, these were people I hadn’t seen in 25 years or so.

Then out of the blue I get a call from one of my Great Aunt’s asking if I’d like to come to the family reunion. A paper flier ensues and the next thing I know I’m uncomfortably trying to make small talk with people who for a number of reasons I didn’t really spent too much time with as a child, and then not at all since around the time I was 13 or so.

The really odd thing about being in the middle of this sort of situation is how people perceive you. I happen to have a very close relationship with, shall we say, the instigator of our little family feud, and people tend to assume that must mean I agree with or at least have some sympathy with this person’s antics, which could not be further from the truth.

My Great Aunt was apparently a bit concerned that she might not get a friendly reception when she called me.

Anyway the lesson is that family feuds really suck, especially when you’re just one degree from the epicenter of the confrontation. Unfortunately, sometimes people who create these situations really are irreasonable and intractable and there’s not much you can do about it.

Frank Sulloway’s Other Hypothesis

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A lot of weblogs are talking lately about a study originating out of Berkeley whose results are summed up by this ridiculous quote,

Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form.

A lot of people have commented on the validity (or lack thereof) of the study and some of its obvious failings (Stalin, et al are also counted as conservatives), but no one to my knowledge has noted the connections between this study and the other nutty theory put forth by one of its co-authors, Frank Sulloway.

Pseudo-scientific theories about conservatism are nothing new for Sulloway who is a prominent advocate of the mother of all psycho-babble historical claims. In his book Born to Rebel, Sulloway argued that birth order is the single most important force in history.

I’m not making this up or even exaggerating Sulloway’s claims. As Scott Rosenberg summed up the book in a review for Salon.Com,

Sulloway declares that “the primary engine of historical change” is sibling conflict, rooted in a Darwinian struggle within the family based on birth order: “Compared with firstborns, laterborns are more likely to identify with the underdog and to challenge the established order. Because they identify with parents and authority, firstborns are more likely to defend the status quo. The effects of birth order transcend gender, social class, race, nationality, and — for the last five centuries — time.”

Sulloway goes so far as to argue that a historical event such as the French Revolution is best explained not by class or ideology or historical context, but rather by the number of first-borns vs. later-borns in the various groups that came to power during the French Revolution.

And, as with the “Stalin was a conservative” line, sometimes in Sulloway’s “data”, a first-born can be a later-born. Galileo, for example, was a first-born and under Sulloways’ theory should have been a conservative supporter of the dominant worldview. But because Galileo was nine years older than his next sibling, Sulloway insists that he was “functionally an only child.” Similarly, as Paul Elovitz notes, Sulloway is also forced to dismiss first-born innovators such as Einstein,

For example, such first born innovators of new theories as Newton, Lavoisier, Freud, and Einstein are dismissed by quickly noting that “the supporters of innovation are still predominantly laterborn.” Of course they are; most people are later born, especially prior to the current low birth rate in Western culture.

As the Skeptic’s Dictionary points out, Born to Rebel is little more than a book-length case of confirmation bias,

Many social scientists also are guilty of confirmation bias, especially those who seek to establish correlations between ambiguous variables, such as birth order and ‘radical ideas’, during arbitrarily defined historical periods. If you define the beginning and end points of data collection regarding the idea of evolution in the way Frank Sulloway did in Born to Rebel, you arrive at significant correlations between functional birth order and tendency to accept or reject the theory of evolution. However, if you start with Anaximander and stop with St. Augustine, you will get quite different results, since the idea was universally rejected during that period.