Alice Walker? Yech!

David Winer posted an Alice Walker quote originally posted at the Book Notes web log. Walker is quoted as saying, “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

The problem with this quote is that Walker is a complete hypocrite. In 1989, Walker wrote a piece called, What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?. After a long diatribe, Walker concludes that the only thing white men should say is, “I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so, and meditate on this.”

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

One of my writer friends, one of Walker’s hated white males, is diabetic and requires regular injections of insulin to survive. Alice Walker, on the other hand, is an avowed animal rights activist who has compared the sorts of experiments that resulted in insulin therapy to slavery in 18th and 17th century United States. Ban such experiments she says.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or demands you right to grow. Add ” …or survive” to the end of that, and you have a perfect description of everything that Walker stand opposed to, despite the phony sentiment she tries to convey in this quote.

Don Larson On Apple’s Woes

Responding to a MacWeek article (itself responding to the latest round of “Apple Is Dead” stories), Don Larson really captures the source of Apple’s current problems and future potential:

Until the MacOS runs on alternative platforms, most people will perceive the Mac as a niche product and treat it that way in the marketplace. For almost twenty years the press has heralded the death of Apple in one form or another because of it’s non-traditional stance on computer products. Now with the rise of Open Systems, Linux, and a variety of products to exchange information, it’s time for Apple to stop being niche and move into the mainstream of this new era. Doing that will serve millions of new customers and avoid bad press for the most trivial speed-bumps of the stock market.

This speaks to the main underlying problem with Apple sales — too many sales of its products going to current Mac users upgrading or adding systems, with not enough penetration into the PC market. That shouldn’t be surprising. If I’ve got thousands of dollars in PC software, Apple’s going to have to come out with a damn good machine to get me to buy in, and so far Apple hasn’t produced that (in fact I doubt they can at a profitable price point).

What Apple could do, however, is port the OS so it can run on an Intel/AMD box, so I can run Windows or the Mac OS. There is a huge upside to this: although Apple pretty much ceded it the consumer OS market, Microsoft has done pretty much nothing to give consumers a reason to use Windows except for the fact that it is the market leader in the Intel/AMD domain. Rather than create a compelling OS that would have no problem competing with a ported Mac OS, Microsoft has cruised on its exclusive position and, if anything, the current Windows Millenium is actually worse than the original Windows 95 as far as ease-of-use (one thing I hate about Windows ME is that it defaults so all menus only show the options that are most often chosen a la the bug/feature that debuted with Office 2000).

Unfortunately, as long as Steve Jobs is pulling the strings, a port of the OS is never going to happen, and the current market analysis of Apple’s future prospects is probably justified.

‘Rogue’ Planets Forcing Re-think about Planet Formation

Reuters is just one of several outlets reporting on the discovery of a system with 18 planets along with a few stars that seem to be doing their own thing rather than organizing themselves into a solar system. Typically planets and stars are believed to be formed from a single swirling mass of gas — the planets being formed from planetary-sized masses that partially escape the gravity of the central mass, which eventually becomes a star, but instead end up orbiting the central star from which it was born.

In the system near Orion which these scientists discovered, the gas giant planets don’t orbit any nearby stars. As one of the scientists put it, “The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form.”

Kasparov Begins Title Defense Against Kramnik

The BBC has a story covering Gary Kasparov’s 16-game defense of his world chess champion title against Valdimir Kramnik. In the 15 years he’s held the title, the only time Kasparov has lost was to a computer back in 1997.

The match is sponsored by BrainGames.Net. The web site has will be web casting the games live, as well as providing analysis and annotated move lists of the tournament. They’ve also got a nice page full of past games, complete with annotation, between Kasparov and Kramnik (the two have met 23 times, with Kasparov winning 3 times, Kramnik winning 3 times, and 17 draws).

‘Natural Resources’ and Human Ingenuity: Is Titanium About to Become Real Cheap?

One of the common errors made by people who argue we are close to running out of natural resources is failing to realize just how much human ingenuity plays in making “natural” resources available. The amount of wheat that occurs “naturally,” without human intervention, wouldn’t be nearly enough to support many billions of people, but by applying human ingenuity and creating an extended system of agriculture, human beings are able to gain access to far more wheat than just that available “naturally.”

Another example of how natural resources can be limited or expanded purely by human knowledge is titanium. Titanium is extremely abundant on our planet — it is the ninth most common element found on Earth. And yet titanium is extremely expensive, which is why even though it has properties that make it more desirable, steel and other metals are typically used where titanium might be a better choice.

The problem is that even though titanium is abundant, it is mixed with other elements. Separating titanium from the elements it is mixed with involves an expensive, two step process. Recently Nature published an article by Cambridge University’s George Chen suggesting a single step electrolytic process that should be able to extract titanium with a one step process, and, if it can be scaled up, should bring the cost of titanium crashing down over the long run.

Those are some very big ifs, but consider another element that used to be extremely expensive: aluminum. Aluminum used to be more valuable than gold for the same reason — although it was relatively abundant, there was no simple process to extract pure aluminum. Then in the late 19th century a couple scientists developed an electrolytic technique to extract the metal and its production soared while its cost declined. In fact this scientific discovery enabled contemporary industrial societies to be the first in world history to see the widespread use of this “natural” resource.

The amount of natural resources available to human societies have as much to do with our own ingenuity and economic incentives as they do with any real natural limit. The current level of technology, for example, is a much better predictor of the availability of aluminum than any laundry list look at the number of aluminum atoms in the universe. By always focusing on such strict definitions of resources and ignoring the way that human invention expands available resources or contracts the need for such resources, many environmentalists and doomsayers only pay attention to half the story.

Source:

Dr Chen and the philosopher’s stone. The Economist, September 21, 2000.

PETA Peeved About Feline HIV Experiments

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is screaming bloody murder over some HIV-related experiments that Ohio State University Michael Podell plans on carrying out in cats. The routine never changes: Podell gets a grant from the National Institute of Health, and PETA butts in saying in its estimable medical opinion the experiment is junk and should be stopped.

So what’s the deal? With effective HIV treatments, many people who contract the disease live a very long time. Unfortunately some of them continue inappropriate behaviors such as drug use. Podell wants to answer this question: we know methamphetamine use increase the rate of neurological degeneration. What special problems does methamphetamine drug abuse pose for long-term HIV sufferers?

Cats have two things that make them good models to explore such a question. First, they can contract feline immunodeficiency virus, which is similar in many respects to HIV. Second, they react in similar ways to methamphetamines. As Podell told the Associated Press, “We want to understand more about HIV and drug abuse in people. One of the ways to do that is to develop an animal model that has similar characteristics.”

The Associated Press reported that PETA has a couple of argument as to why this is a bad idea, but in reality all PETA has is a couple of non-sequitirs — not anything reasonable enough to qualify as an argument, especially since this is the same recycled nonsense PETA uses to argue against all animal experimentation.

First, PETA claims that FIV and HIV aren’t similar enough for research on one to be applicable to another. This is simply a bland assertion that they make about everything but never bother to back up. Polio in non-human primates is different from polio in human beings yet it is similar enough to have yielded important understanding and eventually a vaccine. “Animals are different than people” is not an argument but a claim that demands proof — proof that PETA and animal rights activists simply can’t provide.

Second, in a similar vein PETA’s Peter Wood claims that, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know meth use will have an adverse effect on your body so the disease will be prompted more vigorously. Our limited resources would be better spent on teaching people how to avoid contracting HIV or on drug prevention.”

Lets parse that. The “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist” introduction is, of course, a non sequitur and an ad hominem to boot. More importantly, the sentence obscures the point of the research. Nobody suggests that methamphetamine abuse is good for HIV positive individuals. The problem, however, is that saying “meth use is bad for HIV positive people” is hardly an effective diagnostic and treatment tool for dealing with HIV positive individuals who have been abusing methamphetamine for too long. It might not take a rocket scientist to know meth abuse is going to harm the body, but even a non-doctor should be able to tell that simply informing patients that they shouldn’t have used methamphetamine because it was bad for them isn’t going to cut it either. The more precise information we have about how the disease interacts with common human behaviors, the better off we are — and given the high prevalence of HIV among drug abusers, to ignore that subpopulation is to bury our heads in the sand.

Finally, the claim that this sort of experiment detracts from HIV or drug prevention makes little sense given the huge budgets devoted to both efforts. The interesting part of that sentence is that Wood doesn’t suggest that the money go toward finding a cure since any research toward finding a cure or ameliorating HIV inevitably involves animal research.

Driven by media images, much of the public seems to think that scientists sit in a lab, do a few experiments and find a new cure. In fact finding a vaccine or cure for something like HIV requires years, often decades, of basic research consisting of just the sort of experiments that Podell proposes to do. It’s not glamorous, it’s not the sort of thing people even like to think about given the role domesticated cats play in many of our lives, but it is exactly the sort of experiment needed to add to our cumulative knowledge about HIV on the way to more effective treatments.

Source:

AIDS study targeting cats infuriates animal activists. The Associated Press, October 9, 2000.