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Nick Bostrom at Technology Review has an interesting article in which he challenges conventional wisdom on existence of alien species. I think the conventional hypothesis could be summed up thusly: There are billions of stars (no Carl Sagan jokes please), probably billions of planets, and billions of years for intelligent life to develop. If it happened here, it must have happened elsewhere, so there must be other species out there. Some of them must be older than us, so they should have had time to develop space-flight capability sufficient to colonize planets.
This is the implicit assumption behind hundreds of Star Trek episodes, and is pretty deeply ingrained in our culture. But what if it's wrong?
Bostrom keys in on the idea of a "Great Filter", originated by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University. Perhaps there is some barrier that is extremely hard to get past to get to an intelligent species on a particular planet. One or more such filters might make it so improbable to get to an intelligent species that we are the only ones. Besides the origination of life, the transition to multi-cellular organism and the creation of sex-based reproduction are possibilities. No doubt some would put discovery of nuclear weapons and probably subsequent annihilation in that category.
Or we might just have not hit the relevant Great Filter yet. That is, many species generally similar in capabilities to us might have evolved, but they all faced a challenge which we have yet to face and probably won't overcome because it's so hard.
My candidate for a future great filter is based on two inter-connecting factors. (This is purely my own speculation and isn't in Bostrom's article.) It's long been noted that once a society starts taking care of it's infirm members, evolution slows down or stops. In fact, I think it's possible that without sufficient evolutionary pressures, the natural entropy involved in genetic mutation would cause de-evolution.
Now couple that with the supposed transition to cyborg states as we start augmenting ourselves with technology. Some have posited a Singularity, as the acceleration of innovation hits a near-vertical curve, leading to all kinds of ways that we as biological beings might merge with technology.
I'm not a Luddite; I make my living on the bleeding edge of software development technology. But I'm also aware that increasing complexity in software systems is not an unalloyed benefit. Above a certain point, complexity leads to instability. I think it's an open question as to whether software can get past a certain point of complexity without failing due to it's own internal instabilities.
So I think it's possible that the transition away from biological evolution to technological evolution might contain within it some sort of Great Filter. Perhaps we just get so happy with living in a virtual world that we lose any desire to develop any further, for example. Or perhaps the inherent complexity of such a high-tech state is not resistant to natural disasters in some fashion we can't see right now. I already worry about what would happen in some sort of societal breakdown in a tech-dependent world where perhaps one in a hundred people would know how to feed themselves.
If you're the least bit interested in this subject, I'd recommend that you read the whole article. It's an interesting and well-argued counterpoint to conventional viewpoints.
Do you want a third term for George Bush or a second term for Jimmy Carter?
Posted by: Billy Hollis
Ann Althouse rightly slams Obama for a very lame response to John McCain's criticism of Obama's friendship with Bill Ayers. McCain points out something that's entirely true, as best as we can tell:
[Obama] became friends with [William Ayers] and spent time with him while the guy was unrepentant over his activities as a member of a terrorist organization, the Weathermen.
The heart of the response is:
The American people can't afford a third term of President Bush's failed policies and divisive tactics.
I'm on record as being no fan of McCain. And given the general similarity of Bush and McCain on Iraq and immigration, it's fair to point out the similarities.
That does not answer McCain's point, though. And, as Ann points out, that's the general approach from Obama's campaign no matter what the opposition says.
McCain's points must be quite valid if Obama has no better response that the lame one above. He seems to consider himself above it all, and is trying to get elected on nothing more than the perception that he's somehow more moral and caring than the other candidates.
Hmm. Reminds me of someone else who ran a campaign just like that back in 1976. Today I'm fond of referring to him as the highest ranking useful idiot in American history.
"A third term for George Bush" probably sounds unappealing to many voters, but when compared to "a second term for Jimmy Carter", it might come off looking a bit better.
Hey, MSM! Where were you when Spitzer was merely abusing his power?
Posted by: Billy Hollis
It's a natural libertarian impulse to take pleasure in seeing authority-abusing office-holders get brought down. The Spitzer case, though, goes well beyond that. He has been well and truly hoist on his own petard. As a consequence, he's furnished some delicious schadenfreude for people across the entire political spectrum. He's in his own class in that regard; so much so that John Derbyshire came up with the term "spitzenfreude" to describe it.
It appears that nobody really likes the guy, even his nominal allies. Derbyshire says:
It's not just that nobody likes him now; nobody has ever liked him, that I can recall.
There was not one iota of sympathy for our Governor to be found at that table, even among the liberals. Every second person in the neighborhood works on Wall Street - and no one - including the apolitical - had missed the ruthlessness and utter vindictiveness with which he prosecuted minor and ambiguous offenses, and in the process destroyed companies and lives.
That doesn't surprise me. He always struck me as a holier-than-thou, moralizing... well, I'll stop right there before I get too vulgar. Let's just say he's a thoroughly unlikeable cuss.
Journalists have spent the past two days asking how a man of Mr. Spitzer's stature would allow himself to get involved in a prostitution ring. The answer, in my mind, is clear. The former New York attorney general never believed normal rules applied to him, and his view was validated time and again by an adoring press.
. . .
He was the one who deserved as much, if not more, scrutiny as onetime New York Stock Exchange chief Dick Grasso or former American International Group CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. . . . What makes this more embarrassing for any self-respecting journalist is that Mr. Spitzer knew all this, and played the media like a Stradivarius. He knew what sort of storyline they'd be sympathetic to, and spun it.
I'm too busy to get into an extended debate with the "no, the press isn't biased, they're just sloppy" crowd today. But I'm quite fed up with the malleable principles of the modern mainstream press. They claim it's their duty to be intentionally and consistently adversarial to politicians. When it comes to Republicans, you can bet that take that principle seriously. Yet a Democrat has to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar, crumbs on his face, and a dozen unimpeachable witnesses that will testify that he's been stealing cookies for years before the press seems interested in finding anything bad to say about him.
Why couldn't they have been sitting outside Spitzer's house for days when his cases against various Wall Street types began to come apart?
Unless, of course, it's about sex. Then our mature, sophisticated, cosmopolitan journalists transform instantaneously into circus barkers. They camp out for days to get one more shot of the aggrieved wife. They relish the most sordid details. And, after the, um, orgy is over, the inevitable navel-gazing begins. "Did we go too far? Was our coverage relevant, or just salacious? Whither political journalism?" Which is nothing more than an exercise in self-delusion to make themselves feel better, because come the next sex scandal, they'll be right back at it.
Why couldn't they have been sitting outside Spitzer's house for days when his cases against various Wall Street types began to come apart? Well, that's obvious! He was taking down wicked corporate types! They deserved it! This is the southern sheriff stereotype of "Of course he's guilty... of something." mentality transplanted to Wall Street.
If Martha Stewart deserved prison for her transgressions, which looked rather mild to me, then Spitzer certainly needs to spend some time there too. One gets the strong impression he would have been perfectly happy to serve in various authoritarian regimes in past history. He's not the only one, of course, and such people need deterrence lest they apply their worst impulses. Let Spitzer provide some by example.
The press needs to learn some lessons from this episode also. However, I strongly suspect they will not. The next Spitzer that comes along and jumps on rich people or corporations, no matter how groundlessly, will get them fawning again.
They've demonstrated that they don't really care that much about abuse of political power, no matter how much they claim otherwise, as long as the power is being used against people they don't like. Unfortunately, the next authoritarian politician that "plays them like a Stradivarius" may have enough sense to keep his pants on. That will give him license to abuse power as long as he likes, at least if our vaunted mainstream press has anything to say about it.
However, I'd bet you won't see independent supporters of John McCain making a video that features swooning zombies chanting his name. Unless it's a parody, I mean.
Folks, we are electing a president, not a messiah. The people in this video apparently believe the world is run by magic and you can somehow create exactly the world you want just by commanding it into place.
That's scary. It's the attitude of which authoritarian regimes are made.
Has our citizenry lost the independence of spirit that made this country special? How much of our voting population believes in the modern equivalent of medieval superstition: chanting for "change" and "protecting the environment" as if that's all it takes to make the world an ideal place?
I've said before that I do not intend to vote for McCain. I fear him too, because he has a "great man" complex and if he is elected, I fear there will be no effective opposition in Congress to whatever grand government programs he decides are some kind of historical imperative.
But if Obama's campaign keeps getting creepier, it might start looking like an even bigger threat.
There's one other aspect I'm wondering about. I've said before that the left in this country has lost its hold on reality. It's not hard to see: from the 9/11 conspirazoids to Michelle Obama's utterly incomprehensible view of American business, you can pick out any number of different degrees of separation from reality in today's left.
If Obama is elected, the reality will not match the mystical dreams of his leftist supporters. His grand designs will be opposed by a mostly-Republican coterie in Congress.
I have no idea what the left will do then, but if their apoplexy at George Bush is anything to judge by, it won't be pretty.
If you are interested in any of the following subjects:
- Effects of globalization - Income distribution (rich vs. poor) - Global health issues - Progress of the "third world" during the last forty years - Impact of free trade on a poor country - How to present complex data in an intuitive way
then you need to spend 20 minutes this weekend watching this video. Trust me, it's worth it.
In Nashville, we often talk about the problems faced by music labels and other content providers in an age when copies are effectively free. The music execs put off facing the inevitable for a long time, but they can't do that any more. This article in The Economist recounted a typical example of why:
IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. "That was the moment we realised the game was completely up," says a person who was there. {Emphasis mine}
So now we're past the denial phase, and entering the "what do we do next?" phase.
Of course, it's not just music. Publishing is right behind music. I'm writing a book right now, and so I'm all too familiar with the changing economics of the publishing industry. Many of my colleagues have gone to self-publishing with e-books, because they make just as much money with less effort and more control. Right now, the cachet of having a real, bound book in a bookstore still carries some weight. That probably won't last more than another ten or fifteen years.
The author, Kevin Kelly, has brought together and clearly delineated several ideas on what people still value. The basic idea is that when copies become free, people will still pay for various attributes of content that are more intangible. Kelly calls these "generatives", and he lists and discusses eight of them. Some of them are related to convenience, and others to various emotional aspects of relating to content. For example, he thinks consumers gain emotional satisfaction by paying directly to creators:
Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.
Having paid for and downloaded music directly from a couple of my favorite bands, such as Porcupine Tree, I can attest to that analysis. I liked the idea that they were getting something in exchange for the pleasure I derived from their music.
I know plenty of our readers work in the world of supplying intellectual property or content of various kinds. I think you'll find his discussion very worthwhile.
As a side note, I have a business relationship with some people in the music industry (which of course is not unusual in Nashville). Right now, they're very open to ideas about what they should do next. If any of our readers care to offer their own ideas, I'd love to hear them.
After all, since I'm usually just a token geek, I need something to sound interesting at their cocktail parties.
As 40 years have passed since Gagarin's flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin's famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday. According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at the controls were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959. "All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published," Rudenko said.
I'm not sure, but if I read the dates right, this has been in Pravda since the 40th anniversary of Gregarin's flight, which would be a few years back. But it's the first I've seen of it.
When I saw this, I immediately recalled a passage from Expanded Universe by Robert Heinlein about his trip to the Soviet Union during that same general time period (pages 415 and 416 in the original softcover edition):
About noon on Sunday, May 15, we were walking downhill through the park surrounding the castle that dominates Vilno. We encountered a group of six or eight Red Army cadets. Foreigners are a great curiosity in Vilno. Almost no tourists go there. So they stopped and we chattted, myself through our guide and my wife directly, in Russian.
Shortly one of the cadets asked us what we thought of their new manned rocket. We answered that we had had no news lately - what was it and when did it happen. He told us, with the other cadets listening and agreeing, that the rocket had gone up that very day and at that very moment a Russian astronaut was in orbit around the earth - and what did we think of that?
I congratulated them on this wondrous achievement but, privately, felt a dull sickness. THe Soviet Union has beaten us to the punch again. But later that day our guide looked us up and carefully corrected the story: The cadet had been mistaken, the rocket was not manned.
That evening we tried to purchased Pravda. No copies were available in Vilno. Later we heard from other Americans that Pravda was not available in other cities in the USSR that evening - this part is hearsay, of course. We tried also to listen to the Voice of America. It was jammed. We listened to some Soviet stations but heard no mention of the rocket.
This is the rocket the Soviets tried to recover and later admitted that they had had some trouble with the retrojets; they had fired while the rocket was in the wrong attitude.
So what is the answer? Did that rocket contain only a dummy, as the pravda now claims? Or is there a dead Russian revolving in space? - an Orwellian "unperson," once it was realized that he could not be recovered.
I am sure of this: At noon on May 15 a group of Red Army cadets were unanimously positive that the rocket was manned. That pravda did not change until later that afternoon.
There are discrepancies between the Soviet admissions and Heinlein's account. The Pravda report on the three dead astronauts claims that the flights were suborbital. Heinlein wrote his account in 1960, and the Soviet account places the last of the flights in 1959. So it's not certain that Heinlein caught them in their lie. However, given that the Soviets lied in the first place about the entire incident, I don't think that necessarily disqualifies Heinlein's account.
Her observations on Bill Clinton are pretty much what everyone else is saying, even many Democrats. But her points about George Bush rate a bit more focus:
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"
This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
I think this is a fair statement, and is in line with what we've been saying around here for a long time. I know Bush thought he was doing the right thing by enthusiastically supporting federalization of education, expanding Medicare, restricting free political speech, and so on down the line. He thought that because he has no political philosophy of his own except pure pragmatism. That's not surprising; his father was the same way.
If McCain or Huckabee are nominated by the GOP, it will simply be a continuation of the mushiness and confusion that both Bush presidents established. It seems clear that the GOP is going to need a period in the wilderness before they break free of the idea that they can be light versions of the Democrats.
Huckabee has a small core of evangelicals that are excited about him. They want to explicitly inject their religious feelings into politics. While I'm not in sympathy with their aims, I understand something about their motivations. For many on the left, politics and government are the closest thing they've got to a religion, especially if you place the global warming movement in the political sphere. Thus the left is effectively injecting their religion into politics. Why shouldn't the evangelicals do the same thing?
But running such a man as the GOP's presidential candidate in the fall ensures a loss of Goldwater-McGovern proportions.
As best as I can tell, not very many people get excited about John McCain except some of the reporters that cover him. Some neocons like McCains vigorous defense of the war on terror/Islamism/whatever-you-like-to-label-it. Otherwise, he seems the consensus candidate among those for whom politics is more like a football game, in which winning is the end instead of a means to a certain type of government.
Rush is correct about this. Nominating McCain signifies the end of the GOP as it's been envisioned by many since the Reagan years, and only a serious rebuilding effort or a dramatic realignment of political parties will bring back any significant emphasis on freedom, the free market, individual responsibility, and the other principles most of the folks who come around here believe in.
But there's no point in blaming McCain. He's just following the pattern laid down by the Bush pair. Talk a good game, pander, arrange "grand compromises" which inevitably lead to expansion of government, and get your place in the history book. Limited government principles? Who needs 'em?
And the GOP faithful are still out there attempting to scare folks with "What? Any Republican is better than Hillary! If you small-government types know what's good for you, you'll get behind the GOP nominee, whoever it is. Otherwise, it will be a disaster!"
Well, it will be a disaster - for the political insiders and those whose life revolves around winning. The Democrats already suffered through theirs. In 1994, the entire Democratic political establishment was shell shocked when the GOP took Congress, by a big margin. The GOP has not yet faced their own disaster, mostly because they've been blessed with stupid enemies.
But I think it's coming, sooner or later. Sooner, if McCain or Huckabee are the standard bearer. Later, if the GOP squeezes out one more victory, but just can't internalize the need to stop selling the spending, stop the earmarks, and get serious about their core small-government principles.
You would think that their most successful president of the last century showed them the template they need to succeed, and that they would therefore adopt it. Apparently not. As the old saw goes, they might do the right thing - after they've exhausted all other possibilities.
Perhaps this letter is presumptuous of me. After all, I'm not a Republican and never have been. But I am in a group of voters the GOP needs to win. I'm in that freedom-oriented, libertarian-leaning, small government, low taxes group that was part of the Reagan coalition. Granted I'm a bit more minimal government than most in that group; I'd like to see the government down to less than a quarter of its current size. Anyway, you guys are going to have a hard time winning without we small-government afficiandos. Very hard.
So let me say this plainly. If you nominate Mike Huckabee or John McCain, you've lost me. I won't vote for your candidate. Period.
I don't care who the running mate is, and how much "balance" such a person brings to the ticket. I don't care who the Democratic candidate is, though I won't be voting for him or her either.
I won't vote for any of the Democratic candidates because they're all leftists, no matter what they call themselves. They believe government is the solution to many, many problems that I think government is simply incapable of solving. They all believe in reducing our freedom any time they can get away with it - for the "common good" of course. Hillary, nominally the least far-left of the lot, made that quite clear in her "we're going to take things from you on behalf of the common good" quote.
Why, then, would I not vote for a Republican, any Republican, to oppose them? Because I've learned something about the GOP. When we put you guys in charge with a leader who doesn't believe in small government in his gut, you sell out your principles.
Bush gets mixed grades in his war on Islamic fundamentalism; at least he has shown some aggressiveness in fighting it. However his domestic policies have been awful. Even with a Republican Congress during much of his administration, he used up his political capital on a massive expansion of the welfare state with the Medicare Rx program, a massive expansion of federal government involvement in education with the No Child Left Behind program, and a massive expansion of government power to suppress free speech with campaign finance reform.
And Congress did nothing to stop him. They rolled over. Heck, they did more than that. They got down in the pork and wallowed around in it. Now they stink as badly as the Democrats.
Despite numerous warnings, the Republican Congress did not take any significant measure to increase freedom or decrease government. Not one. Except for a minor tax cut, which is going to expire soon and which looks like it won't get renewed, Congress didn't do anything of consequence in addressing the desires of folks like me.
Contrast this with Bill Clinton's administration. Republicans in Congress stood up to government run health care, forced welfare reform, and obtained expansion of free trade. The bottom line is that during Clinton's administration, Republicans mostly held the line on government expansion or actually made a small bit of progress in limiting government. Under George Bush's administration, Republicans in Congress have become free spending, corrupt beltway insiders who care far more about their own power than about their principles.
Therefore, I cannot and will not support you in putting another Republican in the White House who simply doesn't care about the creeping totalitarianism of the federal government. That's the path to things getting worse. I'd rather see Republicans holding the line than defecting to the other side in a misguided effort to be all things to all people.
Let's look at these guys. First, McCain sponsored the worst rollback of free speech in this nation's history. He thereby shows utter contempt for the rights and freedoms of his fellow citizens. He also demonstrated that he will do anything - anything - to bolster his own reputation with people across the political spectrum.
He looks to me as if he has a "great man" complex and is convinced that he's a world-historical figure. Such men are dangerous. George W. Bush, as mediocre a president as he's been, does not have those problems. Therefore, I must presume that a McCain presidency would be worse by far than the Bush presidency has been in the erosion of freedom and the continued expansion of the size and prerogatives of the federal government. For example, I'm convinced that McCain would "reach out" to create a form of universal healthcare, giving in to the largest expansion of the federal government since the New Deal.
McCain tried to flex his world-historical muscles last year, by giving us a disastrous immigration bill that would do absolutely nothing to solve the problem, but would (he thought) give him another line in the history books. Having realized the magnitude of his misjudgment, he now utters mealy-mouthed assurances that he's "learned his lesson". I suppose that's true, if the lesson he's learned is to do a better job of deceiving the citizenry next time he wants to jam something we don't want down our throats in the pursuit of yet more mentions in the history texts. (Oh, I realize he personally doesn't see himself that way. Too bad. That's the way I see him, and I've never seen a single example of behavior that would make me doubt that assessment.)
Then there's Huckabee. Seriously, fellows. Where did this clown come from? His politics are within shouting distance of John Edwards. He's the worst of all worlds; an evangelical populist. Elmer Gantry meets Ross Perot.
If you nominate Fred, I'll send him some more money. He's far from perfect, but I'm prepared to hope that he gets it, and would put at least a minimal amount of spine in the Republican Party. If you nominate Mitt, I'll grimace, and hope he's not as bad a flip-flopping Northeastern liberal as I fear he is. If you nominate Rudy, I'll shake my head and hope things don't go too badly; I don't think I'd vote for him, but if he wins I wouldn't dread Inauguration Day.
But if it's McCain or Huckabee, you'll get no vote or any form of support from me. I'll probably hope for a Democratic victory with a subsequent inept administration that causes the pendulum to swing towards somebody I can support in four years. Because, based on the Clinton vs. Bush comparison, I don't think a Democratic president would be any worse than either McCain or Huckabee, and at least there's an outside chance that the party and the base voters might rediscover their attraction to less government.
Is this the signal the rest of the media has been waiting for on Fred Thompson?
Posted by: Billy Hollis
The New York Times is used as a reference point for many in the mainstream media. That's even more true of TV than of print journalism. (I recognize that despite my own distaste for them.)
So that makes this article on Fred Thompson more important than it might first appear. I believe there are journalists who will regard this as a signal to cover Fred more seriously.
As I've said too many times before, I have no idea how this race is going to turn out, but I hope Fred does well. I don't subscribe to the "Candidate X has to do well in location Y or all is lost, lost, lost!" school of campaign reporting, but South Carolina is important to Fred. It's as close to home territory as he'll get in the early primaries. So he needs to do well there.
The signals are not too bad. Apparently his campaign events were so crowded they had to turn some people away. I've never seen such a clear consensus on who the media thought won a presidential candidate debate as the one this past week in which Fred dominated.
I don't think Huckabee helped his case after Fred went after by coming back with a laxative joke. It emphasizes the differences between the two men, and not in a way very complementary to Huckabee.
Full disclosure: I sent some money to Fred, and he's the first person in the GOP I've sent money to in over twenty years. My gut feel still says the odds are against him, but oh, how I want to believe that he could prevail against: a moderate-to-liberal NorthEast mayor, a Senator who doesn't believe in freedom of speech or control of a country's borders, a Southern governor whose politics are closer to John Edwards than Ronald Reagan, and a Northeast governor that I can't say anything about because I don't know what he really believes.
The pace of innovation: more gasoline on the flames
Posted by: Billy Hollis
Via Geekpress, I saw this article in The Economist on the growing use of genetic/evolutionary algorithms in innovation and design. One of the consequences of growing computing power is the feasibility of generating improvements through what you might think of as a massive trial-and-error approach. Random variations are introduced into designs, and the results are measured against some metric to see which ones do best. Those best variations are then "cross-bred" with other good variations to see what comes out.
The result can sometimes be dramatic improvement over anything a human designer can come up with. For example:
At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos used an evolutionary algorithm to come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre's bandwidth.
When I think about the application of this technology, plus the real genetic manipulation going on in biology, and the availability of information on all kinds of innovative ideas from search engines, I think there's a lot of possible cross-reinforcement. Innovation has been accelerating throughout my entire lifetime, and it shows no signs of stopping that acceleration. The very pace of innovation picks up every year.
It's always been hard to predict future innovation, but when we're into realms where it's not even people doing the work, the results are literally impossible to predict. We get situations like this one from the article:
His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to Cisco Systems. The team fed the algorithm as much data as they could from the Cisco patent and told the software to design around it. It succeeded in doing so. The result is a design that does not infringe Cisco's patent-and is more efficient to boot.
So now it is possible in some instances to bypass patents. That should speed some things up. I'm not sure what the net effect is; patent protection is one of the things we've always believed promoted innovation by making it possible to gain returns on the investment required to innovate. Is innovation becoming so cheap and pervasive that this concept no longer applies, or is at least significantly weakened?
I had a few other random thoughts. What if someone uses genetic algorithms to improve the genetic algorithms themselves? Will genetic algorigthms thus become more efficient and flexible? Will our lives someday be managed by a device that uses genetic algorithms to find the best way to satisfy our desires?
Bill Gates: A nerd, it’s true, but with a sense of humor
Posted by: Billy Hollis
If you attend Microsoft conferences, you've seen the tongue-in-cheek videos they produce, usually starring Gates or Balmer or both. Here's one of them, spoofing what Bill Gates' last days at Microsoft might look like.
Assessing Fred Thompson - my somewhat contrarian position
Posted by: Billy Hollis
Among the political pontificators, even on the Republican side, I have seen many people count Fred Thompson out of the presidential race. (Even our own McQ and Dale Franks seem rather pessimistic.)
Maybe they're right. But I'm not nearly that pessimistic. No votes have been cast. There is nothing to go on but but polls of people who aren't really paying that much attention right now, and even there he is polling middle of the pack. I would have thought that Dean in 2004 would have given the political pundits a lesson in just how wrong they could be. I've already written about how much unpredictability the entire process has in it.
Despite all that, right now lots of the "experts" are telling us how Fred has mismanaged his campaign, he doesn't have a chance, he's a lazy campaigner, and on and on. But if the voters put Fred in third place in Iowa, hey, he's in the race. Period. If they give him a top two, which I think is possible if Huckabee melts down the way he very well might, then those same pundits will probably start taking about what a smart campaign Fred is running. (For completion, if Fred bombs badly in Iowa, he's got one slim chance left in South Carolina, and that's it.)
If Fred does finish near the top in Iowa, I'd expect McQ, Dale, and a few others to express surprise, and say "Well, I missed the boat on that one". But I don't think that would be the standard pundit response if Fred moves towards the top of the pack.
The same ones who earlier said he was a lazy campaigner would would no doubt praise his ability to stay "under the radar" to the critical point in the campaign, and "stay focused on the voters instead of the horserace". They would hail a "new way of approaching presidential campaigns." We would hear how "Refusing to kowtow to a debate moderator will henceforth be an acid test of leadership." Those guys are so predictable, I could almost write a pastiche of their potential future columns right now.
Let me reiterate: I don't know whether Fred's going to make a serious impact on the race or not. Taking the polls all together, the race looks wide open to me, so I don't think it's unrealistic. I originally thought Guiliani was the strongest guy in the race, but he looks weaker as time goes by. Huckabee always looked to me like a flash in the pan. Romney isn't doing badly, but he's also taking the brunt of attacks from other candidates, and I'm still not convinced Southern voters are going to get excited about a Massachusetts governor.
But there is one thing that's clear to me. Fred decided very early that he would not play by other people's rules. More specifically, that he would not play by the nebulous, self-serving rules laid down by the media, the political consultants, and the rest of the Beltway collective. I think he decided he would either win on his own terms, or lose if the whole process is so rotten that you have to be a McCain/Hillary power-lusting type to win it.
I commend that approach. I'm sick of politics as usual. I'm not in line with Fred on every position he takes, but I like most of what I hear, and I really like the fact that he's not doing the standard Washington two-step to avoid taking a stand on major and divisive issues. I like the fact that he puts out 16 minute videos to explain what he's thinking instead of just one minute commercials. I take some solace from the fact that folks like Peter Robinson over at the Corner says "Even at this late hour, I wouldn't count Fred out."
Perhaps my own perception that he's not out of the race is colored by the fact that I want him to do well, to prove that we don't have to be saddled with plastic, flip-flopping Romneys or populist Huckabees or McCains with their "great-man" complex.
But no matter what the outcome, someone needs to be in there experimenting with different ways to campaign and lead. We need that. I would commend even a failed effort by Thompson, because others would learn from what he tried that didn't work. If Thompson falters, perhaps a Tom Coburn will learn from that and come forth in 2012.
Win or lose, I'm happy Fred's in the race, and the better he does, the better I will like it.
On the economic front, the dollar continued to lose value against all major foreign currencies and most brands of bathroom tissue. There was a major collapse in the credit market, caused by the fact that for most of this decade, every other radio commercial has been some guy selling mortgages to people who clearly should not have mortgages. ("No credit? No job? On Death Row? No problem!") It got so bad that you couldn't let your dog run loose, because it would come home with a mortgage.
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As the debate over Iraq intensifies, the eyes of a worried nation turn to another trouble spot: New York City, where Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are locked in a bitter high-stakes battle to determine who is the bigger horse's ass. After meeting with both sides, a visibly shaken Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reports that Trump's hair "is exactly the same color as a Cheez-It." While the White House ponders its options, congressional Democrats vow to strongly oppose whatever action the president decides to take, while at the same time voting to fund it.
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In other aviation news, JetBlue has a public-relations disaster when 10 of its flights are stranded on runways for so long they are enveloped by glaciers
And that's only up through February. Go read the rest.
Well, lots of others are in the prediction game this time of year, and some of them are venturing some pretty far-out predictions, so I decided to join them. I decided to look at the presidential candidates and venture some, ummm, long-shot predictions for each of them.
First, it's still growth, and roughly in line with economic growth during the period. Simple math will tell you that retail sales can't grow at 8% indefinitely while growth is down around 4%. If it did, retail sales would eventually become the entire economy, which is obvious nonsense. Of course, NYT reporters generally don't seem to take math beyond basic arithmetic into account in their stories. Not surprising; when I taught calculus as a graduate student, I don't recall a single communications major who was ever in my class, or in that of any of my colleagues.
Second, I'm not the least bit surprised that retail spending during Christmas is only growing at a modest rate, and I would not be at all surprised to see it begin to shrink in the years ahead, or at least fall below the rate of growth. My reasoning is simple. I want people to stop giving me stuff. I've got too much stuff already.
Consumer goods are cheap. So cheap that as a young adult, I would never have believed it would get to this point. It's not just electronics. Clothing is cheap. I paid fifteen bucks a pair for Levis in college, and I'm paying less than twenty bucks a pair for Wranglers on Amazon (which I like better) thirty years later, which means my inflation-adjusted price is less than half of what I was paying then. And I have quite a bit more disposable income now. Media is cheap, food is cheap, most anything I want to buy is cheap. Inflation adjusted, a bicycle for one of my sons is less than one third the cost that my parents paid for me to have a bike, and today's bikes are much nicer.
As a result, if we want or need something around here, we buy it. Only big ticket items are excepted, and that's now down to things like plasma TVs and refrigerators.
The result is that we have more clothes than we can wear, more DVDs than we can watch, more food than we can eat, and more gizmos than we can figure out how to use. We don't need any more, and increasingly, we don't want any more.
Too much stuff is a burden. Just finding a place to put it is hard. Remembering where it was put is even harder. Organizing it soaks up the most valuable asset we have now, which is time.
This makes gift giving quite difficult. Most of the people I know are in the same boat, which means finding something they want to have, but don't already possess, it really hard. We gave a lot of gift cards this year, because the alternative is to spend time finding something we think might be appropriate, and half the time the recipient just pretends to like or want it when the first thing they think when they see it is who they can re-gift it to, in order to get rid of it as fast as possible.
I'm pretty sure our Christmas gift spending has fallen quite a bit in the last five years. We still gather with the extended family and still exchange gifts, but several relatives have dropped out of the process. Plus, the customary amount has not gone up in a long time, which means it's going down in inflation-adjusted terms. And I'm seeing strong signs that most of the participants are now seeing the whole process as merely symbolic. Except for some of the younger relatives getting things for their young children, there's just not any real need for much of anything.(*)
If this phenomenon is as common as I think it is, then I'm expecting Christmas spending to become quaint in two or three decades. Why spend money to get something as a gift that's more likely to be a burden than a boon?
No doubt New York Times writers will then interpret it as economic gloom. Unless a Democrat is president at the time, of course.
(*) Disclaimer to short-circuit the usual suspects: I realize there are still victims of poverty, etc. etc. That doesn't affect the conclusion that a very large portion of the population has more stuff than they know how to manage.
As a student of probability and statistics, I've always been fascinated by processes that exhibit a high degree of randomness, such as those bingo and lottery machines that swirl ping-pong balls around until one is chosen. During the swirling, various balls rise and fall, but there's no telling which one will actually get chosen until the moment the operator asks for one.
For some reason, that image came to mind in looking at the news regarding the Iowa caucuses. I've seen so many candidate "surges" now that I've lost count. Events, random and non-random, trivial and non-trivial, seem to be buffeting the preferences of voters much like those ping-pong balls.
For the Democratic side, I'm just an amused spectator. Dirty tricks? Ah, par for the course. I don't really care much who comes out on top. It reminds me of the scene in the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd", in which Spock is listing the possible punishments for Harry's crime. "Death by hanging, death by electrocution, death by phaser.". Harry then says "The key word is 'death'." In my case, the key word is "collectivist". All three candidates carry that badge with honor, so I have not the least interest in seeing any one of them as president.
The GOP side has a better choice, but only relatively speaking. That is, to a starving person, moldy bread is a better option than nothing to eat at all, but that doesn't mean it's very appealing. Anyway, I do have some interest in who wins, but I still have no clue who it will be.
Last week, Huckabee was surging. I didn't understand why; I'm not sure anybody did, including all the pundits who claimed to. I think it might be just an example of randomness because the electorate is not really paying that much attention and is easily distracted. Now, he's getting more attention, which introduces more influences, some of them pretty negative. So I wonder if his surge will fall away, just as a ping-pong ball might almost reach the opening of the bingo machine before plunging downward again.
Romney has surged up, then fallen back, and currently seems to be floating around near the top. Some think McCain (McCain!) is having a surge right about now, when we all left his candidacy for dead (and some of us were happy about that). I don't get the surges of McCain or Huckabee, because neither looks as if he would appeal to the conservative base. McCain is out of synch with the base on two of the three big issues of our time (in synch with Iraq, out of sync on immigration and government intrusion, as exhibited by McCain-Feingold). Huckabee is a populist, and while I've had enough debates with free-trade opponents to know there is a populist contingent in the Republican base, I never would have expected it to be big enough to give Huckabee any traction. Shows how much I know, I guess, unless he fades like a smoke ring, in which case maybe I was right all along.
