Simple Country Physicist

A few bits of “hmmmmm” have been piling up so I am going to collage them together and trim down the tab queue (set, group, pride, pack, herd,…?)

First, I note courtesy of Lee Silver who is a graduate of fair Hahvahd and fesses at Princeton U, that the state of California has issued cease and desist orders to a bunch of firms who offer DNA analysis to individuals. [Link] He professes some wonder at this and frankly I am a bit ‘mazed as well.

Now I will grudgingly admit that government has a privilege to forbid me to do some things that might have a serious detriment to my continued existence as well as things that intrude on the life, liberty, and pursuit of freedom by others, such as not allowing me to discorporate every crapmind I see who drives and talks on a cellular phone simultaneously. I keep hoping that evolution will spring into action but it hasn’t to my observation yet.

But I seriously question whether preventing me from purchasing a map of my DNA really falls under the protective powers of government. Not that I don’t think my family physician wouldn’t humor me and agree to a script or referral, but I do not completely fathom why his sanction should be mandated. Will I be adversely impacted by knowing if I have hereditary susceptibility to certain diseases?

Now I understand that California is at a bit of an extreme for not just the American consumerate but humanity as a whole, but this seems a bit much. Does the natural extension of this mean that you cannot purchase a home pregnancy tester without a physician’s script?

I also note that the number of computers (presumably minicomputers of the laptop and desktop variety? plus maybe servers? isn’t the traditional media wonderful?) has passed one billion, as in 1.0E+09. [Link] And of the 1.8E+08 boxes that will be replaced this year, an estimated 3.5E+07 will end up in land fill. Now, does transplanting a PC from a person into a landfill require a physician’s script in California?

And researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation have determined that war deaths since 1950 CE have been “grossly underreported”. [Link] Having spent a goodly part of my career collecting, analyzing, and writing about “war deaths”, I feel compelled to ask the question:

What makes you think they were accurately reported before then?

If you go to war loss databases, say either the Correlates of War or the datasets I addressed in The Physics of War, one of the things that comes ripping out is that the statistics of war losses are so sketchy as to be almost invisible.

Part of the problem is that the people who do war research, trying to understand war, and those who do peace research, who take as an assumption that war is evil and will do anything to demonstrate that academically (as if it needed it) do not talk to each other.

And the recorded numbers are inherently suspect. Generally combatants want to exaggerate how many enemy they kill, under  report their own losses, and any non-combatants killed are always enemy by default. And that’s during the war. Afterwards the government wants to report fewer overall losses so that other countries won’t think them excessively brutal or now underpopulated and open for conquest.

And lastly, I note in the New Yawk Times [Link] that the Yankee army is out of sorts with the Yankee air corps and has once again founded a Yankee army air corps to give it support in Mesopotamia and the Kush. This explains why the Gates of Defense as been so hard on the Yankee air corps, in particular over not enough reconnaissance assets. Of course, the Yankee air corps guys don’t like to fly missions for the army. They get shot at, can’t shoot back, and can’t obtain any glory kills. Air superiority is supposed to win the war with its achievement, so the Yankee air corps doesn’t take kindly to modern war.

And while on the subject of the ‘net, I also listened to a CBC “Ideas” podcast this morning. The podcast was a recording of a college address by Tariq Ali last year. [Link] And I freely admit to being behind as the podcast was originated back in January but to paraphrase, “so many podcasts, so little attention time.”

Now I find myself neither fully in violent agreement nor congenial disagreement with Tariq Ali, or at least what he has to say, in this case, primarily about the traditional media in Nawth America. But I do find some nuggets of accuracy there that served as accumulation points for though and rumination. He claims, for instance, that the Nawth American tradition media have made unholy alliance with the political sector. If they have, it is a poor alliance given their poor treatment, but there may be entirely too much connivance.

I have previously expressed my disagreement with the media’s hand wringing  over their deterioration, as expressed in works such as The Cult of the Amateur, which decries the rise of the blogger. But what Tariq Ali advances may have some relevance to this.

In effect, he claims that the traditional media has “sold its soul” to the political machine and has ceased to investigate and criticize. As a result, the media has lost the trust of the citizenry. This effect seems to be quite accurate, regardless of the accuracy of the cause. It certainly explains both why large city newspapers and the national network news programs are sagging while small town newspapers and local news casts are booming, or at least, are relatively healthy.

Part of this is content. National news programs are just that, news of national and international events of supposed national interest. Local news programs are primarily weather, secondarily sports, and lastly local news. The aspect of trust and verification are evident. A similar situation is demonstrated by newspapers.

What is not at all clear is whether this deterioration of the traditional media is a direct result of the deterioration of the established political parties. Certainly they are on the wane, becoming not only increasingly irrelevant as well as increasingly indistinguishable except in terms of rhetorical catch phrases. The latter has been the case in Alibam for many years – can anyone imagine an Alibam democrat who is publicly in favor of women’s rights to abortion or of gun control – but the degeneracy is spreading. The amorphous vacuity of this year’s candidates for chief executive are ample demonstration of this.

It is almost as if democracy having overcome the evils of communism must now also succumb to its tiredness. What does seem indicated however, is that the nation needs change and that change will not be provided by either the established political parties – and their molded candidates – or the traditional media. So can the ‘net offer a political venue?

One of the emails in my inbox this morning is the daily Technology Review eletter from the wonk shul on the Charles. It has a blurb and a link to an article entitled “The Future of The Web”. [Link] The article is a set of quote snips that start out with the absurd:

I note that researchers at U Texas have discovered how to use stem stem cells to “generate” nerve cells. [Link] The rather neat part of this is that this was the result of observing an “unintended consequence”, which is a subject of some interest to me. The researchers were trying to make heart cells and happened to observe that in a relatively small number of samples they were making nerve cells.

This type of thing is rather mythic in science and as with most mythic phenomena it is double edged.

Most scientific research is pretty much plodding trial and error. It is work of love, not of excitement. But occasionally something unexpected happens, the researcher is alert enough to note it, and something unsought develops. This is a moment of excitement, as is the moment when the plodding finally connects.

The difficulty is that these accidents of observation are worthy of note, either journalisticly or historically, and hence are visible far outside the information domains of scientists. This causes some complications.

Because these events have an excitement attached to them, they enjoy a wider exposure than the plodding work that is most science. As a result of this imbalance, the general consumerate tends to think of what scientists do is to wait around for these accidents. The whole thing tends to give science a flavor of Indiana Jones rather than Walter Mitty. It disillusions thousands of children a year when they find out that a lot of hard learning work-time is required to be a scientist. It is much easier to be a justicer or an entertainer or someone else who does nothing that contributes to the continuation of the species.

In many ways the only good thing that can be said of such is that their existence can be used to counteract the stupidities of program managers who think everything can be achieved on a schedule and a budget. For some reason they are unable to conceive, much lest understand, that any activity may be characterized by rare accidental events and not smooth deterministic progress. Or even of the maths linking those two.

One of the notable thing this summer, at least in Greater Metropolitan Arab, and, yes, I realize that summer has only recently been officially inaugurated but my definition of summer has been blogged previous, has been the considerable observation of slugs. That is, gastropods – stomach feet – who lack a protective shell like snails. These have been rather small slugs, most in the range of a cm. or so +/- 0.33 in length.

Slugs and snails are often regarded as pests by local folks who keep gardens, and I have even known some overly anal retentive types who despair at their tracks on the paved surfaces on their property, as if this somehow labels the occupants as white or black, as the case may be, trash, in our colorful and politically incorrect Southron idiom. I find myself relatively neutral on the matter, as I do not keep a garden and I dislike yard work sufficiently to cultivate a reputation of being too absent minded to be trusted with such tasks. As I was explaining a few days ago, mowing the yard is beneficial the first couple of times one does it as one learns the mechanics of it but thereafter it is a waste of time that could be spent thinking or acting on physics.

I also know people who are rather antithetic about gastropods, largely because of their metabolic dependence on mucus. I believe the common vernacular is that they are considered to be slimy, which indeed they are unlike snakes, which are not but are often viewed as such by people who dislike them as well. Of course the modes of locomotion are quite different but that is often oblivious to the common consumerate.

My mention of these animals is partly due to my increased observation this year, up from a few a month to a few a day, and that their motion is usually rather slow. This leads to the connection with MegaHard. Courtesy of Matt Asay, [Link] I note that MegaHard’s internet explorer browser, which might more properly be called slug except for the denigration of slugs everywhere, has been found to be about half as fast as the current versions of both FireFox and Safari.

This also gives us a chance to say something nice about MegaHard: at least its browser does not leave a trail of mucus behind it.

Having railed at the autocratic and bloody corporate oligarchs of entertainment, it now seems fitting to bemoan the general stream of odious fecality dribbling out of the RSS feeds this morning.

Our first note is that the Yankee government is on the verge of permitting physicians to “write” electronic scripts for “addictive drugs”. [Link] One of my more practical and insightful colleagues, who has asked to remain anonymous, asked if this meant that the physicians would write out scripts on paper as they do now, their staffs would scan the script and burn it onto a CD, and the patient would then hand carry the CD with the image file of the script to their pharmacy?

Quite apart from the medical apparat’s continued commitment to paper records, with their associated hip chaining of information and its media, the fundamental solution is not the piecemeal electronification that the medical practitionery is gradually accommodating but a national (maybe) medical database so that medical service providers (including physicians and dentists) and patients have a single point of concentration of all medical records.

Such a database is a large undertaking, but not beyond the scope of current technology. It does however suffer from a couple of rather substantial difficulties which may be sufficient to totally compromise its existence. The first of these is the opportunity for misuse and damage. By the nature of the database a LARGE number of people will need access to the database and most of them will inherently need write permissions. Given the currently demonstrated error rate in medical actions and the data indicating that the most common source of database sabotage is insider mischief and revenge, the assurance of such a database is beyond concerning through unnerving and into panic.

Secondly is the cost of such a monster. I speak not of the direct costs of the servers and the like; such can be found largely in savings from duplication and transcription implicit to the current paper system. Rather the costs are the indirect ones to individual practices to adopt the system and the implied costs of security. In the latter case, we can make comparison to the current insurance system which has the effect of increasing practitioner overhead by a factor of 0.25 to 0.35. This is why the instances of no insurance, even cash only practices is increasing.

In the former case the need to police the database, of assigning transient permissions to personnel who have only a passing need to access a particular individual’s records, and the like are potentially monstrous given that they will often require human intervention.  One can easily estimate that this will require as many IT personnel as there are physicians and dentists with a concomitant set of overhead expenses, such as for continuing education, that rival the direct overheads of the practitioners themselves.

In the other hand, we are facing the likelihood of a classical tax and make poor democrat administration next year.

And while we’re on the subject of medical matters, I note that the Yankee government FDA has figured out the tomato salmonella thing. [Link] It appears that the whole thing is a plot by illegal immigrants of Hispanic root. How’s that for a weekend conspiracy theory?

Next, I observe that the state of the Floridas is planning on litigating the Yankee government Corps of Engineers for not letting enough water flow in the Apalachicola River. [Link] Seems this violates the Endangered Species Act, so the matter is one of one branch of the Yankee government setting up the state to be punished by another branch. Of course what is at root here is the matter of global climate change and its resulting drought in the old Confederacy, both of which are contrary to current administration policy and hence do not exist.

Given the state of things, perhaps it would make sense for us to give the Floridas back to Spain? Most of the denizen of the Floridas speak the language, and its value to the nation seems more problematic every passing day. Also, one suspect Spain could do a better job of running the place anyway.

The good news is that a safety assessment committee has determined that the operation of the Large Hadron Collider will not cause Tellus to go poof (or otherwise.) [Link] The problem with this is that the committee who issued this report are all physicists who are dealing with law of the first kind and the crapminds who are promulgating the doomsday scenarios are dealing with laws of the third and fourth kinds. And there is no assurance some over-arrogant justicer won’t bring everything to a shuddering halt until such time as his brain can cope with the nature of real reality and not the wet dreams of the legal profession.

This problem, of course, comes from lawyers and politicians, which are almost always connected physically – and that is about all they comprehend of physics – who think that their made up rules actually constitute reality. On the other hand, consumers thing that the marketplace is reality. No wonder then that as Ben Goldacre of the Guardian notes [Link]

I think science coverage is pretty poor, and a lot of it is plainly wrong.

I regret that I have to overwhelmingly agree with Mr. Goldacre. And I am saddened that this fact is effectively unrecognizable by not only  the traditional media of the Yankee republic but also the majority of its consumerate/citizenry.

This is not to say that scientists are always right. Indeed, they are almost always wrong, but they do have two saving graces. First, they know what they are saying is likely wrong because that is what distinguished science from superstition. And second, even with almost always, that is still considerably better than the politicians’ always.

In the wake of an earlier admission by a Yankee government justicer that he vertically copulated when he instructed jurors to interpret the existence of a OS folder with copyrighted information in it as evidence of infringement, [Link] (this was one of the “lost blots” in ScribeFire never-never-land) the Motion Picture Association of Amerika has come out with even stronger claims of their “right” to harass, intimidate, and loot.

One of the basic tenets of law is that it is reactive and  not proactive. That is, one cannot be punished for a crime until (a) one has committed a crime, and (b) that commission is suitable demonstrated to be real. Evidently though the rule of law is inadequate for the MPAA. They state:  [Link]

“Mandating such proof could have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances,”

This statement would seem to mean that profit is more important than human rights. I was also taken by the statement that:

“It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement,”

The last I checked thieves and murderers are seldom in the practice of recording their crimes; demonstrating their guilt is not considered unreasonable.

This seems to definitely indicate that the ideal state of affairs for entertainment manufacturers is one of the harshest, arbitrary dictatorship. But one does wonder if this means that proper rebellion against such injustice is exactly the crimes they decry?

The experiment seems to be successful so far, so an actual blot will now be assayed.

While we are on the subject of science fiction, it is not too much of a leap to the original Star Trek, which is probably as close as any of the ilk came to being science fiction. In that millieu we consider the temperament and traits of the chief engineer, Montgomery Scott. Leftenant Commander Scott, who was a scot, and an obvious parody of the classical role of the scot on a ship as an engineering officer who was engineer first and officer second, as opposed to line officers, was know to occasionally make the classic, trite scots pronouncement “Ye canna do that” in a moderately broad burl accent.

The “ye canna do” of interest here is a new prohibition in Scotsland in the form of the Sexual Offences Bill [Link] that makes it illegal for anyone to send a text message of sexual content.

I have to admit to some trepidation of this. I have known a few real scots in my day, not just people who emigrated and still have “son of” for a name. Indeed, my family is of border descent, which hardly counts as the most notable thing about borderers was that both the Scots and the Sassenach English (yes, I ken that’s a redundancy) were adamant in claiming borderers to be members of the opposite group. In addition, they were lowlanders and hence nekulturny.

In that regard, I have known scots who would engage in human reproductive activity under any conditions and for any reason, no matter how dangerous or specious, respectively. I have also known some so religiously hidebound as to be incapable of arousal unless the female was fertile. That the latter have apparently manifested this depredation on the former is indication of a sad day for Scotsland. The next thing you know scots will start visiting dentists proactively. And any hope of the return of the stone is dashed by this calumny. One may even wonder if this is some hideous plote of the sassenach to deter independence.

Several years ago John Brunner (as I recall) wrote one of his Almost-End-of-the-World novels about the internet. In that novel the ‘net was a metaphor of a universe of everything, good and bad, good and evil. Note the confluxion of meanings of “good” here.

As I remember the end of existence is averted by the fortuitous acquisition of just the right piece of software and accompanying information from the ‘net.  My situation has a considerably more banal parallel.

For some reason when the repository pushed out the actual release of Fire Fox 3, Scribe Fire went bonkers. Despite messages to its developers/parents on the nature of the problem and various work-arounds on my part to its new want of deleting the text of blots before posting them, I have lost more blots this week than I have successfully posted. And the ones that did get posted were a matter of saving the blot, posting it, logging on to the on-line editor, recalling the saved blot, and pasting the contents from the latter to the former. Sadly however, the save function has also become erratic.

I was thus somewhat enlivened this morning by an article/blot on MakeUseOf [Link] this morning comparing ScribeFire and another FireFox add-in Deepest Sender, which is an on-line or live blog editor. Quite frankly, the article/blot is pretty much a pan of Deepest Sender but I installed anyway because in my situation it can be no worse than ScribeFire inasmuch as the latter does nothing but add to my stress level.

So far the experience is not negative. If anything, it is positive in that Deepest Sender is rather minimalist compared to ScribeFire which seems to have acquired the MegaHard Office Suite disease of having to be everything possible to everyone and unworkable for almost everyone but the most vapid and superficial of users.

The crucial question, of course, is whether the beast will post or not in adequate entirety.

It is a fundamental tenet of law that justicers must be reactive rather than proactive. For example, murder is a crime, but one cannot be found to have committed that crime until one actually murders someone. And while one can be guilty of a crime by planning to murder someone, that crime is conspiracy and not murder.

An exception to this has been practiced in the area of copyright protection. Up until now, the presumption has been equivalent to if one is found with a gun in one’s hand, regardless of whether it has been fired or not, one has committed murder. Or in this case, if one has a folder on one’s computer with copyright files on it, then one must have violated copyright.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? The sort of thing one would expect in a dictatorship, not an ostensible democracy under the rule of law. But this is exactly what has been happening in the litigations of the Recording Industry Association of America. Except that one of the judges has had his arrogance snapped and the error of his ways explained – by academics. [Link]