Cybermosquitoes

This isn't a Terminator Anti-Singularity blog, I promise. Remember when I said I'd be much less scared of grinning cyberskeletons than I would be of little buzzing cyberflies? (To read about my fear of cybermosquitoes in that last link, you have to scroll down a little but it's there.)

Well now:



[Added later: via Boing Boing, a group in Zurich is doing the same thing.]

Los Angeles Always Makes Me Think of the Terminator

...but I think I can be forgiven. After all, it's not unreasonable to confuse the silent, dusty, post-apocalyptic sprawl, towers and warehouses pressing on all sides yet eerily devoid of life, patrolled by lurking inhuman predators (on the one hand) with the fictitious future Los Angeles in the movie (on the other hand).


Above: actors flash their pearly-whites in the line-up at a casting call outside an LA talent agency.

What's Worse Than People Who Hate Video Games?

People who hate video games, except they've spent the last week playing one from 1986. Now I realize why I hate all video games: because you dummies didn't realize that video games were perfected with Star Glider, and everything since then is but a pale imitation.

The Epidemiology of Cancerous von Neumann Comets, Part II

Original post here. The following belief is probably one of my weirdest ones but I'm confident in it and would like to test it. Still it's unlikely that we'll have evidence for or against in my own lifetime. Consequently I went to Longbets.org to post my prediction but learned only at the end that there's a fifty dollar publishing fee. No deal.

So here's what I was going to enter.

SUMMARY: By the time we have surveyed the surfaces of 1% of asteroids and comets in the Solar System, we will have found definitive evidence of extrasolar replicators, von Neumann probes or otherwise.

SUPPORTING ARGUMENTS: The argument has been made by Tipler that the absence of von Neumann probes is in fact much more damning to the prospect of extrasolar life than the absence of signals as observed by Fermi. That we, in the infancy of space exploration, have as yet an absence of evidence of von Neumann probes is certainly not evidence of absence; this is rather like a Roman orator having claimed that there are definitely no continents besides Europe, Africa and Asia. In fact there are good reasons why the Earth's surface would not be a good place for space-traveling replicators, the economics of gravity wells among them. Using the self-indication assumption and the explosion of our knowledge about nearby planetary systems, it is becoming increasingly unreasonable to suppose that there are no other replicators (planet-bound or otherwise). This means that if space-borne replicators are possible, they are probable, and we should look for evidence associated with comets and asteroids. I make this prediction contingent on exploration because I'm not nearly as confident about when that will happen. I do appreciate that 1% is still a massive number of bodies, so I don't realistically expect this to occur within the next two centuries.

[Added later: Japan is about to test solar sail technology which is one passive way that replicators could diffuse. The design is engineered to get to Venus, on the way accelerating to 100 m/s over six months, which translates to a Sun-to-Alpha Centauri crossing in a little over five millennia, a reasonable scale even for biological diffusion on Earth.]

Alien Taliban Hijack Voyager 2

As many in the science/technical community already new, Voyager 2 is acting strangely of late. NASA has been hard at work trying to figure out what's going on, but unfortunately they're ignoring the brilliant advice of Hartwig Hausdorf, who informs us that the spacecraft has been hijacked by aliens. Well obviously.

Let me just say I'm always glad when mediagenic crackpots aren't Americans.

My computer does unexpected stuff all the time, but I don't think it's because of aliens, unless you count Bill Gates. In my case it's often what IT professionals refer to as an "I-D-ten-T" error. So what's the difference here? Because Voyager 2 is a computer in space. Space is cool and aliens are there. So if something unexpected happens to a computer in space, then it must be aliens. Case closed.

As it turns out, there are lots of smart people at NASA and they've just figured out the problem. ("Well of course that's what they would say-" Shut up Hartwig, don't you have to go to an anti-vaccine conference or something?) Fortunately for the exciteable among us who prefer science fiction to science, there's still no good explanation for the Pioneer Anomaly. Meaning, aliens are doing it.

My Nemesis Was Kind Enough to Pose for a Picture

(Kaybee Toys in Manhattan, November 2002).

Statewide California Earthquake Drill 21 October

More information here. I'll go out on a limb and say it might actually be fun, plus then people can't keep muttering "Sure they can do public earthquake drills in Japan but that would never work in the U.S." In the meantime if you have the right kind of laptop you can join the earthquake sensor network. I wonder if they'll simulate earthquake lights prior to the drill?

I Didn't Even Know Dio Was Sick

I saw him backstage when he was playing with Maiden and Motorhead in San Jose. Real nice down to Earth guy.

My Roadtrip to Ganymede

Nine years ago I decided to make the drive from San Francisco to Denver at Christmas. I took these at dawn in western Wyoming and between the wan sun and near-sterile landscape, when I developed these, they reminded me of what I imagine the surfaces of gas giant moons look like, minus the occasional sage.

The Process Architecture of Linux vs. E. coli

They look different. E. coli on the left.



Linux is modular and easier to change, but E. coli is more resistant to disruption. Very cool paper here.

Sell 10^9 Shares in Skynet

Given my obsession with linking the Singularity and Skynet, I found this Economist post about the stock market plunge last week funny.

I am Apparently a Morbid SOB

I now have five "dark tourism" points. I didn't realize until now that I have engaged in what could be called a pattern of behavior. The five points I have are:

1. Columbine High School

2. The Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, TX, which a) is still there and staffed by Davidians and b) where I announced myself at the gate as Janet Reno, and then drove away quickly

3. Anton Lavey's last house (I picked some seed pods from noxious black weeds on the lot and planted them at my old house in Berkeley and my mom's house in Pennsylvania so there could be a sequel but so far, to my knowledge no scary music has started playing in either place, and there's not even a general sense of foreboding)

4. The last location of the Jim Jones church (where I led a run and had the group celebrate by drinking spiked grape Kool-Aid instead of our usual beer)

5. And as of this week, the Heaven's Gate house. von Neumann comets or not, boys, bad idea.


Apparently they're developing the Jim Jones site in Guyana as a "dark tourism" site, but I find that offensive. Because then you would be paying to be briefly amused by human suffering and death (instead of seeing it for free).

Cool Job: Shooting Lasers at the Moon

I can't believe someone gets paid to do stuff like this.

Future Corporate Personhood: Union Pacific Meets Skynet

This is cross-posted at my economics and social science blog The Late Enlightenment.

In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a legal decision which is regarded as significant because it in effect granted corporations legal personhood. Southern Pacific Railroad was the defendant in a case brought by Santa Clara County, California (the modern day location of Silicon Valley).

We can all concede that this seems strange on its face. A corporation is a social and legal fiction that exists by fiat of its owners and stake-holders, and has no free will of its own. By the same token you can't get out of a car accident by saying (for example) "It was my mirror that clipped you, not me, and the mirror is the car's property, not mine." By the same token, your dog doesn't own his leash, your computer doesn't own your printer, etc. - you do - and you're responsible for them. Thinking about it this way makes it seem even more bizarre that a mere century and a half ago, in much of the U.S., you couldn't own property if your skin wasn't the right color, because you yourself were property (or could be). Again: a computer can't own a printer.

That the legal conceit of corporate personhood seems strange does not mean that it is bad. There are lots of mutually-agreed social hallucinations that have ended up benefiting their participants, materially or otherwise: social mores, nation-states, games, religions, and certifications. Some of these mutual hallucinations differ in that they are considered inarguably "real" constituents of objective reality outside of their human participants, while some are not. Some of them are more voluntary, artificial, and explicitly engineered for a purpose; the trend is toward these. This is a good thing, and corporations are a prime example. Everyone knows that a corporation isn't a person, but legal conceits are like the social equivalent of capital markets or enzymes: as long as it's above board, everyone winks and then is okay calling a spade a club until you get the loan, or you lower the energy of the transition state. Then you get over whatever barrier you had to wealth or energy generation, and everyone gets what they want.

Some seem concerned at the unnaturalness of these legal conceits and fear that once we legitimize such silliness as corporate personhood, we open the door to a future in which humans exist enmeshed in an increasingly byzantine network of such arrangements. This phobia is portrayed darkly in books like The Unincorporated Man, which attempts to convey a dystopia in which one such future legal conceit is the opposite of the Union Pacific decision, where individuals incorporate themselves and sell shares of themselves to investors. In fact, due to a desire for wealth creation driving an increasing profusion of complex social arrangements, a world like that one is almost certain to come to pass, and furthermore I hope it does! No, I personally cannot imagine a world of personal corporatehood, and if I woke up in 2100, I'm sure I would have a hard time adjusting. That in itself is no argument against such an arrangement. In the same vein Julius Caesar would have been equally clueless about (and perhaps frightened of) the concept of corporate personhood, though if he were born in 1960 I bet he would get it just fine.

There is one concern I do have for the future of corporate personhood specifically that I haven't seen discussed and which I grant will seem esoteric. Corporate personhood is a safe legal fiction only when the property owned by the corporation is not equivalent in its abilities to a person. That is, there was no confusion about the bounds of property and person in 1886 or today. None of the steam engines sitting in Southern Pacific railyards had the potential to achieve a place in the Southern Pacific boardroom. This observation will seem less pointless when we recognize that some of the property of corporations will almost certainly, by the end of this century, be at least equal in decision-making ability to board members. In 2100 the steam engines or at least the computers running them will probably have a say in corporate governance. If a corporation consists of a single powerful computer, that corporation will then be a person, both legally and (de facto) cognitively.

If you've read Stross's Accelerando, it's hard not to think of the computer system that was constantly spinning multinational shell corporations around itself to protect its owner's interests. We can argue later whether these machines are "conscious", "intelligent", or any other adjective that interests you. But will we see incorporated expert systems with no human board members? Is this a threat to the human economy? Is this an argument for or against designing a constitution in a legal programming language that has to be compiled and can't execute until its internal logic is consistent? The utility of these legal fictions is that we live in the real world and we can reel them back when they get too non-sensical or damaging; at such time that corporate personhood is deemed a threat to human happiness and survival, we can eliminate the convention. We can't do this with a corporation that has literal vested interests of its own.

Can Radon Emissions Predict Earthquakes?

Story about Nobel laureate Georges Charpak's work here. Being from Pennsylvania, I thought only certain parts of the world with lots of uranium-containing pitchblende in the bedrock (like Pennsylvania) were uniquely afflicted with radon emissions. (Hat tip Boing Boing).

To join the earthquake sensor network (geology's answer to SETI) go here.

To read about other as-yet unexplained phenomena associated with earthquakes, go here.

Philip K. Dick Journals to be Published Next Year

News here.

Should-Be Household Name #2: John J. Montgomery

San Diego- and Bay Area-based flight pioneer John J. Montgomery received a patent for his aeroplane design and died testing one of them. He was the first person to execute a controlled, heavier than air, manned flight (he sat in it, it flew, he could steer, but had no engine.) He was partly inspired in his engineering by French-American engineering genius Octave Chanute. Montgomery Airport in San Diego is named for him.

Should-be-Household Name #1: Russell Ohl

Playing "Find and Replace" With a Naive Attitude About Aliens

Lots of people have weighed in on Hawking's recent comments, which is great because it means that people are finally thinking about it. It's kind of like the asteroid-strike problem: no, it's not likely in the next few years, but humans are very bad at thinking about probabilities of unlikely but extremely consequential events.

People are apparently unable to apply the lessons of history to this question and end up somehow conflating the ability to travel between stars with having supernaturally transcendent moral sense (which, amazingly, stems from the same value system as the claimant). Imagine that tomorrow it's reported that in the southern Pacific, there's an island that until now the ships and satellites have missed, home to a completely naive culture. Would these folks say "But we have the technology to cross the ocean! That means that we're morally transcendent beings who've tamed our savaged instincts, so contact between global civilization and this island can only be positive for them!" That's the exact argument they're making here, only worse. It would be a little closer if we found a culture of semi-intelligent slime molds.

So let's have some fun with find-and-replace. Here's what Ethan Siegel would say, if he were a North American living in 1491, instead of a member of global industrialized culture in 2010. I have italicized the parts that become particularly rich when viewed in light of actual history.

If a ship managed to come all the way from another continent to within range of North America, we would already know an incredible amount about them. What follows is what I would say to them.

We know that, like us, you grew to prominence on your continent, developing over thousands of years to become the most successful culture in your land. We know -- like us -- you gained mastery over your environment, learning to utilize resources and tools to construct a myriad of things that would have never existed without your intervention.

And, unlike us, you have managed to build a ship to sustain you during a trans-oceanic voyage, far away from any natural power sources (like wood). This is a fantastic achievement, and we are a long way off from anything approaching this! Your technology is far, far advanced from ours. It's very likely that your exploration skills -- particularly for finding lands you're interested in coming to for their natural resources -- are superb, and vastly superior to our own.

In other words, if you're looking for new land in order to harvest resources from and we're a good fit, you're going to find us whether we advertise or not.

But we are young, and in our technological infancy. It was only 3,000 years ago -- about 120 generations -- that we started planting seeds and growing our own food. It is only now, at the present day, that we are beginning to learn how to build organized multi-ethnic governments. And you must have figured that part out in order to develop the technology and devote the resources to sustainably survive without land at all.

There are so many questions we are striving to learn the answer to, that we are only even beginning to pose well. And yet, to survive a long-term ocean crossing, any people must have already figured out an answer to these and many other questions. The two big ones that I want to ask are these:

* We have evolved to be selfish hoarders, always hungering for more, and to expand beyond the means of our resources. How did you overcome the limitations of your evolution? [This part I have ironically left unchanged. -MC]

* The resources available to plunder on our planet are limited, and it is almost unimaginable to imagine surviving a long amount of time (many months, at least) without any solution at all! But you did it. What was your solution to your energy needs?

But to imagine malevolent people? Why? Destroying us would be like crushing a colony of microbes just for kicks to them. Their technological level must be at least hundreds, if not thousands of years beyond ours. Can you imagine even the greatest military force from the Napoleonic Era even lasting a few weeks against our modern warfare technologies? It simply wouldn't happen.

But what irks me most of all is the cowardice behind a viewpoint that we shouldn't rush to meet another culture from across the ocean. It would be like forgetting the best part of being Native American: our bravery, our sense of adventure, our will to explore, thirst for learning and discovery, our curiosity, and our desire to experience all that existence has to offer.

I am eager. I want to meet them. I want to know the answers to those questions. Right now, I find it very unlikely that there ought to be another culture within a thousand miles of us. But if there is, I'm going to try to find them.

So if any other civilizations read this, PICK US! HERE! All Native Americans may not be ready for you, but some of us are. If you come, the rest of us will come around. And I'll be among the first to welcome and greet you. Be gentle with us and be careful with our delicate native flora and fauna. We have a lot to learn, and could use a great teacher. I hope to hear from you soon.

Twenty-First Century Prog Metal

Check out Tetrafusion. They have songs about gravity and the Big Bang. They're cool.

Hawking Also Says We Should Shut Up

At Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker points to and paraphrases none other than Stephen Hawking: "For the love of god, everybody just stay quiet. If we're lucky, they won't notice we're here." Hawking joins many others in taking the same position.

By all means, we should try to hear them. But not vice versa. Did Native Americans build signal fires on the shoreline in case anyone in huge ships was sailing by and wanted to exchange their transcendent philosophical ideas?

Perhaps the Fermi paradox is best explained by rational behavior of the organisms involved. And the ones that make noise aren't making it for long.