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The ACLU reports that a bill that would require the Department of Justice to formally disclose information about its use of the secret intelligence court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is garnering bipartisan support in Congress.
Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) are among the sponsors of the bill.
Talkleft has an interesting entry today on the role that immigration lawyers are playing in the fight to protect and maintain our constitutional rights in the wake of 9/11, 'enemy combatant' treatment, and INS detentions and deportations.
Gizmodo has the lowdown on the following:
Everything you ever needed, right there at your fingertips!
New York Songlines is a hyper-linked map of New York City that gives a few details on what you can expect to find on each city block.
In a bizarre mass-malfunction, Venezuela’s clocks are ticking too slowly due to a power shortage weakening the electric current nationwide. By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight.
I once lived in the southeast corner of Indiana where some towns are on Central time and some towns are on Eastern time (it was actually more complicated that that because the majority of Indiana was on Eastern Standard time all year round which meant for all practical purposes different time zones at different times of the year). The locals called it 'slow time' and 'fast time' and (proof that I was probably not cut out to ever be a local) I could never figure out which was which. Whenever there were meetings you had to figure out if the town the meeting was in was on fast time or slow time. But it was handy if you'd worked late and wanted to go get lunch--you could head for the town on 'slow time' (or was that 'fast time?)
I particularly applaud Venezualans for taking their particular version of slow time in stride:
But in a nation that rarely starts on schedule, Venezuelans have taken their time troubles in their stride. An air traffic controller casually told Reuters that his office corrected its clocks every few days or months, without incident so far.“Yes, it’s been happening here. But we correct the clocks every three months and there’s no problem,” he said.
Lost Labor.com contains:
a selection of 155 photographs excerpted from a collection of more than 1100 company histories, pamphlets, and technical brochures documenting America's business and corporate industrial history This collection has been assembled over the last 20 years and many of the titles are rare and difficult to find. Since the images document factories, machinery, and jobs that no longer exist, LOST LABOR provides an unusual visual and historical record of work in 20th century America.
...via Metafilter
Apparently, it's introvert's day at Blogdex.
Go visit An Introvert's Lexicon
My favorite is the introvert's definition of 'Work':
Being pestered every five minutes about something trivial, and not allowed to concentrate
Dang it! I wish other people would stop writing the essays I wanted to write!
Joi Ito has an interesting essay on Emergent Democracy
Democracy:
ideally to be governed by the majority and protects the rights of the minority. For a democracy to perform this properly it must support a competition of ideas, which requires critical debate, freedom of speech and the ability to criticize power without fear of retribution. If it is a representative democracy, the power must be distributed into multiple points of authority to enable checks and balances.
Emergence:
the arising of patterns, structures, or properties that do not seem adequately explained by referring only to the system's pre-existing components and their interaction
Emergent democracy is (if I'm understanding correctly) a way for understanding, consensus, problem-solving, and radical new solutions to emerge from small and large interlinked discussions involving vast numbers of people who may or may not even be aware of how things all interconnect.
Dan Gillmor says his readers are smarter than he is. Together, we--all ofus--are smarter than any president, legislature, or government. The world is a complex place, but it's also a place where we can be smarter and wiser than we've ever been and this essay is a really interesting take on what's already happening and what's possible. As Joi Ito says, it's a possibility for which the technology is just starting to emerge and which we can see the beginnings of in weblog interlinkages and interactions.
Atlantic Monthly March, 2003 issue includes Caring for your introvert by Jonathon Rauch.
The BBC has a report on a small island nation in the Pacific, Nauru, which has basically lost contact with the outside world:
Nauru's telephone system collapsed on 8 January amid political chaos, and since then the island has only been contactable when ships equipped with satellite telephones made stops there, the AFP news agency reported
Nauru once had the highest per capita income in the world. Then, phosphate mining collapsed, an attempt to provide off-shore banking turned into money laundering for the mob and a current effort at interning asylum seekers for Australia has collapsed:
Late last year, Australian immigration officials admitted that the asylum seekers, mainly Iraqis, had been running their own detention centre since officials abandoned the site following a riot.
It feels post-apocalyptic, this report of a tiny nation almost completely cut-off from the rest of the world and sinking deep into chaos. It can't happen here, in our world, right now. But it does.
We don't know as much as we think we know about intelligence, and positing that we do fails to address the mind-body problem and has a tendency to fall into the thinking that science explains all. That said, it's tough to deny that genetics plays a role in who we are and, at the least, how we do what we do. What generates a lot of talk is what we do with this information.
Calpundit asked awhile back:
There are dangers involved in genetic tailoring, and the technology is still decades away, but it strikes me that the potential for good vastly outweighs the potential for misuse. After all, what's the real objection to giving birth to children who are smarter, more compassionate, or better problem solvers? Since most of human progress has come from exactly those kinds of people, I'd think the more the better.
I say: because in the same way talent gets defined as 'skills I value right this minute,' we keep--wrongly--defining 'smart' as 'ways of thinking or knowing that succeed today.' We don't know the doors we'd be closing if we could suddenly select for this narrow definition of 'smart.' Intelligence can be different. How someone thinks can vary. How we value that thinking can change. Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton and the The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney are a couple of books I’d throw out from my recent reading that have interesting takes on this issue.
Charles Murtaugh adds another perspective:
Is there such a thing as quantifiable intelligence, and is it affected by the hardwiring of our brain and/or by genetic inheritance? This seems like an academic question, but for a previous generation of liberals it had obvious political implications; otherwise why would grandees like Howard Gardner and the late Stephen Jay Gould have spent so much energy trying to answer in the negative?The answer is obviously race; as Gould pointed out, correctly, people with an unhealthy obsession about the intellectual capacity of blacks tended to be those most interested in the genetic basis of intelligence. There are all sorts of unwholesome reasons for this -- mainly because if intelligence was quantifiable and heritable, it could be distributed differently between whites and blacks, and this could back up racist claims about superiority and inferiority. Still, though, granting the ugliness of some participants' motives shouldn't suffice to end the discussion, and good liberals don't like to be seen closing down an argument purely for ideological reasons. So the move was made to deny that intelligence is real, or inheritable; an alternative strategy has been to declare that "race" has no scientific basis, but this approach is notably failing.
Calpundit follows up with a post about athletic ability, which I assume will also have a followup post later. It's an interesting place to go. I'm willing to jump in the deep end for the moment and say that there's no such thing as athletic ability, there’s 'being good at this particular physical thing' and sometimes there are a certain set of skills that give someone a broad talent in several athletic undertakings. There are also important non-genetic factors involved. In The Frailty Myth, Colette Downing talks about why girls so often 'throw like girls.' One huge factor is how long they've been throwing at all. Boys (and yes, this is changing rapidly and drastically, something Downing also discusses) start throwing balls sooner, throw them more, and get more coaching. When they don't, they often 'throw like girls,' too. Women's athletic records have changed more rapidly over the last thirty years or so than many men's records (and if the book wasn't at home, I'd post an example). The social aspect of women and athletic ability has been huge historically. It doesn't mean that genetics doesn't play a role in determining some undefined aspect of athletic prowess, but the political and social issues so outweigh the genetic that genetics isn't even really on the table yet (not least of which because we don't know which aspects are genetic and which are other).
Would I want to be more athletic or smarter if I could plug in a gene and go? Or, at least semi-realistically, if I could choose such for my non-existent children? Athletic, how? Smart, how? Would they be happier? Would they be more successful? There are whole worlds of 'smart' and 'happy' and 'successful' and we haven't yet found ways to reduce all this to formula without losing or devaluing something else in the bargain.
I think this is all very interesting and something I've thought a lot about, not so much in the context of manipulating future humans for the betterment of the world, but in the aspect of how we define intelligence and what it means for how we relate to each other and to other species.
I have a whole additional post I'd like to make on Intelligence and Rottweilers which no one will probably care about but me. But, hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. Maybe this weekend...
I've been working on an essay about the abuse of the French for their stand on the war with Iraq. But, look, Joe Conason says, in a piece for the New York Observer, what I was going to say:
The French are derided as cowards by people like Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican who somehow escaped the Vietnam draft. The French are accused of coveting Iraqi oil contracts, as if our insatiable need for petroleum had never influenced American policy in the Middle East. The French are accused of ingratitude, although most Americans remain ignorant of the critical role they played in our own revolution. In my hometown, there was an elementary school named for the Count de Rochambeau, yet nobody bothered to teach the children there about his gallant service to George Washington.
And,
Whatever insults are hurled at France, its views are shared by most Europeans, including the people of Britain, as well as by the majority of nations on the Security Council, not to mention many American military leaders and quite a few ordinary Americans. Vilifying the French doesn’t invalidate that position—and throwing nasty tantrums only reduces American prestige, in an era when we need allies as much as they need us.
...is the tagline for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting newsroom. Depending on how you interpret it, it could be kind of disturbing. Let's pretend it means being in the science professions.
The 2003 AAAS annual meeting took place this week and brought together scientists from all over to talk about a huge range of reasearch and, if nothing else to remind us what a vast lot of 'stuff' modern science embraces. Among the interesting items:
Misunderstanding the prehistoric southwest: what happened at Chaco?
Two University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have developed intriguing theories on the mysterious demise of the Chaco Canyon Pueblo people and the larger Chaco region that governed an area in the Southwest about the size of Ohio before it collapsed about 1125.
Case for massive black hole strengthened
UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez reported at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver that the case for the monstrous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy has been strengthened substantially, and that all of the proposed alternatives can be excluded.
Pain and the brain: Sex, hormones & genetics affect brain's pain control system
Gender, sex hormones, and genes appear to play a big part in how individuals' bodies and emotions react to pain, according to new data. The findings, from brain scans of the brain's natural painkiller system in action, include surprising data showing that women's ability to handle pain increases with their estrogen levels. The studies may help determine why some people, especially women, are more frequently prone to disorders – like temporomandibular joint pain and fibromyalgia.
Predicting the climate of the 21st century
Warming land and ocean surfaces, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and other recent evidence strongly suggest that Earth's climate is already changing rapidly because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to Warren Washington, senior scientist and head of the Climate Change Research Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Computer models of Earth's climate support these observations, he says, and indicate more severe changes yet to come.
Scientist looks at less to find out more about quantum materials
At very low temperatures, classical physics fails to explain phenomena at tiny scales. This is when quantum mechanics kicks in. Scientists are now chilling materials to study the behavior of electrons in the smallest discrete building blocks of matter. Then they are looking at those materials in reduced dimensions, which confine the flow of electrons, to study novel quantum states. ''Usually you get new physics when you impose confinement,'' says Stanford Professor Aharon Kapitulnik.
Here's a web page that talks about how to communicate with aliens.
In case it comes up.
The concrete challenge however is that when extraterrestrials are contacted (SETI), or land (UFOs), somebody is presumably going to be considered as appropriately briefed to communicate with them. The media, and science fiction, have explored many possible scenarios. The two most typical are:
- aliens are met by (or handed over to) some branch of military intelligence for secret "negotiations"
- aliens are met by John and Jane Doe who have only media scenarios, common sense, and their prejudices to guide them
And how have such people been prepared for this encounter? Is there a manual (on the Web) to assist in this process, or at least to indicate the possible traps? Does this emergency website offer links to sources of guidance? Does it offer interactive facilities -- like some health sites -- to enable those faced with such a challenge to clarify their options in the light of any information that emerges at different stages of the early interaction with the aliens?
Before true communication can occur, we would have to negotiate our differences, not only figuring out what the differences are, but what they imply and how we compensate for them. Some of the areas we might differ:
So, who should we put on the committee to communicate with aliens? According to this paper:
- Martial arts (aikido, etc) -- vigilance, preparedness, respect for opponent (Black belt)
- Performer, aesthete -- responsiveness, reframing, expression
- Communicator, facilitator, empath, humorist -- (Peter Ustinov)
- "Operator", trader, con-man -- opportunism, vigilance (it takes one to know one)
- Biologist, species empath -- understanding
- Jesuit -- avocatus diaboli
- Taoist / Mullah Nasrrudin -- crazy wisdom response to the moment
- Anthropologist, linguist, protocol
- Theoretician, physics, mathematics (Richard Feynman)
- Game player
- Philosopher
- Lawyer
I think the most interesting question is, how do you tell if aliens are intelligent? All the measures we have (no matter how we argue them) are culturally and societally based. We don't have a clear way to tell whether dogs or dolphins or lions are intelligent, though we presume that they are not (in the human sense). We will not have a way to tell that aliens are intelligent, though we will presume that they are. I've often wondered what difference this makes in how we approach things--assuming that it's an intelligent being with whom we can't communicate versus assuming that it's an unintelligent being with whom we can't communicate....
CNN reports:
Police in London, England, said turnout Saturday was 750,000, the largest demonstration ever in the British capital. The organizers put the figure at 2 million. In Germany, 500,000 protested, and 300,000 gathered in 60 towns and cities across France.
The biggest demonstrations seen in Europe for years were part of marches by millions across the globe, from the Antarctic to Iceland.
Yahoo says:
More than four million protesters took to the streets around the globe on Saturday to send a message to President Bush (news - web sites) not to attack Iraq and to give peace a chance.
In a huge wave of demonstrations not seen since the Vietnam War, anti-war marchers in more than 600 towns and cities from Canberra to Cape Town and Chicago called on Bush to back off his hawkish stance toward Iraq, which his administration accuses of hiding weapons of mass destruction that pose a global threat.
On Stand Down, Philip Leggiere shares some first-hand observations:
A cynic might try to describe the throngs as a cacophony of special interest groups, but as one who's been (periodically) to large peace demonstrations since the mid-70s (and is predisposed in many ways to cynicism about political demonstrations) this one feels qualitatively different. Less politically sectarian and far more widely gauged in terms of age and social groups.
Other first-hand reports can be found here and here.
Update: Reuters (via Yahoo news) has upped the worldwide estimate to 6 million participants in today's protests.
We carry our past with us. There's no doubt about that and no escape. But we are more what we say and do today and yesterday and last week than what we did forty years ago.
On February 12th, Senator Robert Byrd said:
Calling heads of state pygmies, labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating powerful European allies as irrelevant -- these types of crude insensitivities can do our great nation no good. We may have massive military might, but we cannot fight a global war on terrorism alone. We need the cooperation and friendship of our time-honored allies as well as the newer-found friends whom we can attract with our wealth. Our awesome military machine will do us little good if we suffer another devastating attack on our homeland that would severely damage our economy. Our military manpower is already stretched thin and we will need the augmenting support of those nations who can supply troop strength, not just sign letters cheering us on.
He said plenty of other good things, too. I'd recommend reading the full text
As Michael Douglas's character says in The American President:
We have serious problems to solve and we need serious people to solve them.
Grown-ups would also be welcome.
...via TalkLeft
Calpundit has a great post on the lengths some people are willing to go to convince us that the Bush 2004 deficit isn't so bad.
Whence indeed? The real question, however, is, can't these guys even be bothered to pretend to tell the truth anymore? Look what Bowyer had to do to get his figures:
- First, the only Clinton budget on his list is from 1993. But the budget for FY1993 was prepared by the GHW Bush administration. We were a third of the way through FY1993 by the time Clinton was inaugurated.
That's enough, really, to show that Bowyer simply doesn't care about making things up if that's what it takes to make his point, but, incredibly, there's more:
- He claims that Clinton's deficits were larger "on average" than Bush's, ignoring the fact that Clinton inherited a deficit from GHW Bush and steadily decreased it, while GW Bush inherited a surplus from Clinton and has steadily squandered it.
- Next he pretends that Bush's deficit is reasonable because "Nations at war borrow money." But the cost of the Iraq war isn't even in the budget yet and the cost of the war on terrorism is small compared to the size of the deficit.
- And finally, he gripes that everyone is focusing obsessively on the 2004 budget, which is patently false. As he himself notes, it's the vast and growing long-term deficits that everyone is really complaining about.
I'm getting really tired of this 'on average' crap. On average, a room of thirty homelss people and Bill Gates is full of multi-millionaires.
Technology Review has an article on 10 Emerging Technologies that will Change the World. Included are:
I actually have some essays and longer things I'd like to get posted, maybe over the weekend. But in the meantime, check out the Flash Mind Reader!
It's fun just to enjoy, but I actually figured out how it worked, which is so unusual for me as to be worthy of remark.
Prof, "What is the diffrence between a History Professor and a Large Pizza, simple the Pizza can actually feed a family of four"
Are we all agreed that there are a finite number of dogs in the world?"
Baffled Student: "I don't understand..."
Prof. Lamb: "OK. In other words ... No, in the same words, ..." [repeats explanation exactly]
Phillip Buehler shows us places we don't go to anymore at his website, Modern Ruins.
I can't help it. I love this stuff. It's like coming on an old house when you're out hiking, a reminder that entire histories of the world are going on just out of sight and notice.
A Japanese scientist is working on a way to make objects appear virtually transparent.
I want one.
Sixty-four cities, including Des Moines, Iowa, Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, and San Francisco, California have passed City Council Resolutions Opposing War in Iraq.
A number of other cities and counties have campaigns underway.
...via Talkleft
A Quicktime movie with Anne Troake, a choreographer, developing a dance for heavy equipment.
via BoingBoing (who calls them cranes, but they're not...)
Steve MacLaughlin has excellent summaries of Columbia shuttle news here and here.
...via BoingBoing
As everyone probably is aware by now, the space shuttle, Columbia, has broken up on re-entry over Texas. There are no survivors.
It's the breaking news at CNN. Some initial speculation on cause can be found here. And there are updates, discussion, and expressions of grief all over the blog-o-sphere.
There's not much for me to say, really, that isn't being said elsewhere.
But, well, damn...