Ken Liu's Mono No Aware Deserves the Hugo

Really, the only bad thing about this short story is the title, which might lead you to believe it's trying to garner attention with superficial exoticism. It deserves the Hugo for best short story, for which it has correctly been nominated. And for the way he just manipulated me as a reader, let me just say Ken Liu, you son of a bitch.

Stop the Lone Signal Project

Story here. There are in fact already protocols established in the event of alien contact, the most important part is that the discoverer must not unilaterally assume they can make decisions for the entire Earth. Here are some reckless, naive, selfish jerks are now sending messages (Gliese 526). This isn't the first time signals have been sent, but usually those signals aren't target at nearby star systems. Gliese 26 is 18 light years away.

If you think I'm being alarmist, then let me just quote Stephen Hawking:

[Hawking states] that intelligent alien life forms almost certainly exist — but warns that communicating with them could be "too risky."

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

Astronomer Zdenek Kopal may have put it even better when he said "Should we ever hear the space-phone ringing, for God’s sake let us not answer, but rather make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible to avoid attracting attention!" Robert Rood said, "The civilization that blurts out its existence on interstellar beacons at first opportunity might be like some early hominid descending from the trees and calling 'Here, kitty' to a sabre-toothed tiger." (More on this here.)

Imagine Native Americans building signal fires along the coast to make sure that the first Europeans knew where they were. And what resulted was a chain of events between members of the same species. It is absolutely stupid and absurd to assume the outcome could possibly be any better if we're detected and visited by aliens more advanced than ourselves. This team is either not serious about their project, or willing to endanger the whole Earth. This is a classic low probability, extremely high consequence event. Any consequence to our ecosystem from such signals being sent is going to be unimaginably worse than global warming. After all, we may have so much trouble detecting "loud" civilizations out there because they don't last long; maybe a predation factor is missing from the Drake equation.

The Lone Signal project really seems to be about charging people to put text messages in their little beamings to other stars. We're taking these risks so someone can make a few dollars from a novelty project.

Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra and the Lone Signal team, stop this project. I would support legal action to stop you as well, and readers, if you care about the continuance of life on Earth, you should too.

China Sends Astronauts to Its Own Space Station

Three astronauts have arrived at Tiangong-1. I'm amazed at how little media attention this event has received in the West.

Vaccines and Vitamins

This is cross-posted to my atheist blog, The Lucky Atheist.

From the NY Times:

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994, 29,000 Finnish men, all smokers, had been given daily vitamin E, beta carotene, both or a placebo. The study found that those who had taken beta carotene for five to eight years were more likely to die from lung cancer or heart disease.

Two years later the same journal published another study on vitamin supplements. In it, 18,000 people who were at an increased risk of lung cancer because of asbestos exposure or smoking received a combination of vitamin A and beta carotene, or a placebo. Investigators stopped the study when they found that the risk of death from lung cancer for those who took the vitamins was 46 percent higher.

Then, in 2004, a review of 14 randomized trials for the Cochrane Database found that the supplemental vitamins A, C, E and beta carotene, and a mineral, selenium, taken to prevent intestinal cancers, actually increased mortality.

That's from a NY Times article a friend sent me and asked for my opinion about. First, you should probably weight the findings of a peer-reviewed study much more heavily than the opinion of a fourth year medical student; read the article and follow up the individual studies if you're curious. It's also worth pointing out this nice summary is written by Paul Offitt, the pediatrician who co-invented the rotavirus vaccine and wrote "Autism's False Prophets" (for his efforts he receives frequent death threats from anti-vaxxers).

All that said, the findings are not so surprising. Why is that people think an animal which existed where nutrients, predation, and infectious disease were always limiting, is then freed from those constraints, and is suddenly immortal and perfect? If a car is designed to last for 100,000 miles, and you take really good care of it (more than the engineers expected) you might get 200,000 miles before a major breakdown, but you won't get a million. Less metaphorically: megadoses of fat-soluble vitamins are already known to be bad, so consuming anything in dramatically different quantities than nature has accounted for is at best, not going to do anything. In any event I'm betting the effect sizes are still pretty small. It's much more likely air pollution or a bad gene will get you than too many supplements. But more supplements won't make you live forever.

For anyone who has any protective feelings for the supplement industry and harbors any suspicions that the big bad doctors and pharmaceutical companies are attacking a poor little defenseless business - the supplement industry is a $32 BILLION dollar industry, complete with lobbyists. They're maximizing profits, period, like everyone else.

To expand on this: to my transhumanist comrades in the rationalist movement, I say your desire for long life and/or immortality is a worthy goal! But there's no hack for it, any more than using a certain kind of motor oil will make your Ford get to a billion miles. Probably not coincidentally, I find it's often programmers who don't understand the limitations of non-symbolic moving parts, unlike those in software, but very like those in cars or organs. To that end the impulse to become code via the still complete-science-fiction of uploading is understandable, though it makes some pretty big assumptions about the nature of consciousness that I don't think people are ready to literally bet their lives on.

If anyone is aware of backlash against these studies and this article I would be very interested to read it; please post in comments.

Are People Less Likely to Become Colonists Now?

As compared to a few centuries ago? Certainly. Humans in general today are less likely to strike out to a new land and become colonists. Why is this?

(This is cross-posted to my science fiction and fact blog, The Late Enlightenment.)

1. The environments that are available to us are harsher. Seasteading? The Antarctic? The Moon or Mars? Come on, do you really want to live in any of those places? Sure, Virginia may have had a bit more malaria than England but it has a) solid ground, b) it never drops below -50 C and c) it has a 21% O2 atmosphere. Consequently, it takes a more complex and developed economy to allow survival in the harsher land. And even Jamestown wasn't self-sustaining until the third ship full of people and supplies arrived. (More on Jamestown and Mars here.) And think: how big would a colony in Antarctica have to be in order to be self-sufficient, and make all the equipment they need to survive, not to mention to trade with the rest of the world? (See below for places that are much more amenable to humans than Antarctica and frontiers ripe for settlement right now, but somehow are still not filling up with colonists, in some cases despite the local government's attempt to draw them.)

2. There is a bigger skills gap between the median person and what a colonist needs to know. Even if a new island appeared above the ocean and had a nice temperate climate, few of us (especially in the developed world) would be able to take advantage of it. In Jamestown, people plowed and planted fields, hunted, chopped wood, and built small structures. That's pretty much what they were doing at home except for the building part. Even in the developing world, the gap between the skillsets required of someone living day-to-day versus what they would need to do in a terra nova is much wider than what the settlers of the New World faced, or the Polynesians that expanded across the Pacific. And the hunter-gatherers who crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America almost certainly didn't even know they were on a new continent (and why would they have cared?)

3. We're just more comfortable. Yes, there are still people in desperate poverty, but not as many of us three centuries ago. The median human is much happier, and if they move, they have more information about which countries offer better opportunities, rather than helping to build a country from scratch.


The exceptions I alluded to above are Siberia and the Canadian interior and the Australian Outback. That's a significant chunk of the Earth's land surface. Seriously, if you think that there is no more wilderness and no more frontiers, just buy a few coats and a hunting rifle and move to the Yukon. West Australia is the size of America's Western and Pacific time zones combined and has a population of 2 million, 1.5 million of which are in one city, and at least near the coast a Mediterranean climate quite like California's, and massive mineral wealth to boot - and even with all that, the Australian government has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to get people to settle it. In any of these places you can quite easily meet Daniel Boone's requirement of refusing to live anywhere that you can see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney. But you won't do this, despite any belly-aching you might have done along these lines. Why not? Because you have a good life already and you have no idea how to hunt, that's why.

Resonance and Sand

The Ghost Fleet In San Francisco Bay

Cross-posted to my outdoors blog, MDK10 Outside and Facebook too. Find me on Facebook here.

You know that ghost fleet floating in Suisun Bay (the Bay Area)? No? Why not? Images from these maritime "urban" explorers here. Via BoingBoing and Maggie Koerth-Baker, who has an amazing knack for writing/linking THE most interesting science (etc.) stories on the web, period.

Maybe what the government needs to finally do something
with these ships is a few planet bombs. Next thing you
know they're putting wave motion engines in them,
Vallejo's economy picks up, whammo. Win-win-win.

Singularity Watch: Your Movements Detected By Existing WiFi Technology

Paper here. Now HAL can see you picking your nose. And if you haven't seen this, give it a second, it's worth it:

Short Stories Set On Real Exoplanets

A picture of a planet 300 LY away.
Hey, I got your hard science fiction right here. Actually, the Kepler scientists do. It's kind of strange; if people keep writing science fiction about stars that are near Earth and the details of their solar systems don't match what we now know, isn't that fantasy now? I mean, of course it's all fantasy, and we're all Romans imagining Africans with faces in the middle of their chests (which they really did, out of ignorance + curiosity) or Spaniards believing the tales of wyverns in Patagonia - but still, now we know something about these places, and these stories are doing it right. Otherwise, this is the equivalent of writing about battles and countries in Southeast Asia or Central America that never existed. Interstellar alternative history of a sort. (Really, click there. Cool alternative histories.)

The Real-Life Captain Okita (Captain Avatar)

I mean come on. Obviously he came back in time and pretends to be a philosopher but he also admits to being an avid sailor. Sorry dude, busted. You have almost two centuries lead time to beat the Gamilons, get to it. (Really it's the philosopher Daniel Dennett.)

The Evolution of Metalheads, Or Metal as Confrontation - A Review of Immolation

I've written before about metal as a modern war dance. We'll come back to that in a second. I was listening to Immolation's Kingdom of Conspiracy, which has received great reviews.



Briefly: music is organized sound that evokes emotion - specifically, sustainable non-aversive basic emotions. That is, the basic emotions that you can experience at length and that don't make you want to get away. That means in music we have happiness, sadness, anger, but not fear, disgust or surprise. That does explain most music. And interestingly, this German-Canadian research study comparing the reactions of Europeans vs. Pygmies listening to each others' never-before-heard music shows that a given piece of music might stir different emotions, but a) they would still activate basic emotions and b) they would do so to about the same extent. That is, maybe when Pygmies are listening to Beethoven they get sad instead of happy, but they got sad to the same degree the Europeans get happy, and the Pygmies didn't get contemptuous or disgusted. I found this fascinating because these two groups of people are not only culturally isolated, they are also about as genetically unrelated as it is possible for two groups of humans to be.

Until the mid-to-late twentieth century, there was a hole in Western music in the sense that anger was not represented. Sure, we have military marches, but those are limited in exposure (because most of us are not warriors, and most of us don't have warriors in our families), and associated with large institutions that young males in need of angry music probably don't want to submit to. (Although it must be said, many metalheads also like military marches, myself included, and some metal sounds like military marches.) So it might not be surprising that in the West we re-invented war dances, right down to the posturing, threats and war paint. Seriously. Watch the by now, fully established faces and movements of metal performers and then listen to a Lakota war song or watch a Maori haka. The angry young males of the West had a vacuum in their experience and metal filled it.

So what does this mean when those angry young males become less angry, and much less young? Listening to Immolation, I wondered about two things that have changed in many venerable metalheads' appreciation after decades of listening, for art generally, and metal specifically.

1) For art generally, you become acutely sensitive to structure and format.

To this end, most death metal described as "technical" or "innovative" actually doesn't depart much from the standard format of rock in general established over half a century ago (and frankly dating to blues before that). Intro, verse chorus maybe another verse chorus, bridge, maybe solo, verse chorus outro. (The leads on this record are my favorite thing about it, but they're not new. They're kind of Kerry King meets Michael Amott.) These are the rules of metal, and deviations are reckoned against them. But the reality is that if music deviates too much from a recognizable format, it's not enjoyable, and it's hard to follow; see much of modern classical or avant garde music, which you can't remember immediately after listening to it. All nervous systems have a balance between recognizing patterns, but having enough novelty (mismatches or otherwise unexpected elements in the information) that it causes more attention to be paid. This becomes an increasingly difficult feat as a genre's possible space (given its rules) is swept out by compositions; maybe this explains why new genres tend to appear in big bangs of punctuated equilibrium as a new compositional space is broken into, rather than being best predicted by artistic gradualism. But I notice that us old metalheads, explicitly no longer value novelty like we did (or claimed we did). Someone is intentionally going to write a Part II to Reign in Blood? Sign me up! (Sadly, occasionally bands say they'll do something like this, but then they don't.)

2) For metal specifically, I'm tired of the confrontationalness of it.

As mentioned, metal songs are for the most part modern war dances. And you get past that. If you can't see the performers or the music as intimidating, you can no longer appreciate this part of it; and there's not much else to say on this front. The fantasy of powers that the music projects, either from direct threats and claims of strength or gaining power through taboo violation (a known theme in anthropology) becomes harder to take seriously; there are people and things in the world to be legitimately afraid of, and at a certain point, your boss getting angry at you or your kid getting hit by a car become much scarier than any corpsepaint ever could be, even in some state of suspended disbelief during a show. It also bears mentioning that for young genre music enthusiasts, consuming that particular genre does part of the job of establishing your identity (why should being a metalhead or hip hop fan have anything at all to do with how you dress or any other aspect of your life but what's on you iPod? But clearly they do.) As music fans get older, their identity gets filled in by other things - in particular, profession and family. You hope. Unless that profession is "musician".

The point is not to say, "I'm too old to like metal anymore, and soon you will be too." It's a call to performers and consumers to recognize that innovation for its own sake is not usually productive and it's actually preferable to focus on writing killer music within the rules; and also to establish new rules not for their own sake, but to produce new material that relies on tonal and rhythmic interaction (which itself can make you angry or scared; heard of Opeth?) and not how scary everything is supposed to be.

Oh yeah, the Immolation review. Like I said, I mostly liked the leads. There were a couple big, hummable riffs too.

Defiler Live in Bryansk, Russia

Get more Defiler here.

Metal Appreciation Degrees, Cont.

Tyler Cowen writes about the metal degrees earlier noted here in "How to Make the Rate of Return on Higher Education Negative". When this post is on your screen, the pixels between the letters will emit not just light but silent sarcasm. It's truly wonderful.

Starship Century Symposium UCSD

With Gregory Benford, David Brin, and others. At Atkinson Hall, UCSD. More information here.

Those As I Lay Dying Lyrics Have a Different Meaning Now

Kind of like re-watching the old Naked Gun movies where OJ is a cop. Story here. I've often said I liked As I Lay Dying Songs because they don't f*ck around and I didn't know how correct I was. Fellow metal fans are often not kind to Christianity and in As I Lay Dying's case I encouraged them to overlook this.

Regarding Mr. Hanneman's Funeral: Westboro Baptist

In the Bay Area? Looking for Drum Lessons?

Cast Iron Crow's Ryan Long has some openings and is offering lessons. Interested? Go here.

Skynet is Already Practicing on Pigs

Wild pigs are being exterminated with drones. At least the apocalypse will have bacon.

To Rot and Lie Stinking in the Earth

It can't be in bad taste when the person was in Slayer.

Interview with Yoon Ha Lee in Clarkesworld Magazine

I've posted links to her work before. So much great in this interview, including:

Most of the time I write didactically, as if a short story were a proof. There is some object lesson, or ethical question, I want to leave the reader with. "Ghostweight" is a good example of this; it doesn't pretend not to be didactic. So when I build the character and their strengths and weaknesses and motivations, when I build the setting, the majority of it needs to be in support of that point. With a proof, you want to include all the necessary axioms and arguments, but leave out the extraneous. A short story is very similar.

Another great point she makes, in keeping with this motivation in her work, is that her characters are marionettes who serve other purposes in the story and that she's not attached to. Her clarity in this regard is one of many things which makes her prose stand out.