Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

What’s The Point?

7 Comments

Sarah Pullman is very unhappy with Facebook’s privacy policy.

OK, I got a Facebook account last fall, at the urging of several people, who told me that I simply had to have one (though they could never actually explain why). I’ve yet to figure it out myself. I’ve gotten no discernible benefit from it (of course, I haven’t invested much time in it, either). Can anyone explain to me what the big deal is, and what I’m missing out on if I don’t have an account, or don’t use the one I have?

[Update late morning]

While we’re on the subject, here’s an article on which is better for business: Facebook or LinkedIn?

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, War Commentary

Where Have The Heros Gone?

6 Comments

It’s not a new subject, but Lileks muses on what’s happened to Hollywood (and popular culture in general):

…imagine a story conference for the Beowulf movie: you know, I see modern parallels here – not surprising, given the timelessness of the epic. But the Mead Hall is civilization itself, an outpost constructed against the elements, and Grendel is the raging force that hates the song they sing-

“They hate us for our singing!” Knowing chuckles around the table.

No seriously, he does hate them for their singing. That’s the point.

He hates what they’ve built, what they’ve done, how they live their lives.

“Maybe he has reason. That’s the interesting angle. What drives Grendel?”

Yes, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. No one’s ever taken the side of the demon in the entire history of literature, especially the last 40 years. By all means, let us craft an elaborate backstory for the guy who breaks down the door and chews the heads of the townsfolk, that we may better understand how we came to this point.

Space, Technology and Society

A Glimpse Of The Singularity

13 Comments

Charlie Stross sees it.

What I found interesting, though, is how quickly the discussion in comments transitioned to how slow the progress has been in space access, with NASA taking a beating.

There is no question that space technology, with high-powered (megawatts/gigawatts) devices is fundamentally different than things that switch bits and electrons around, and it’s not reasonable to expect it to come close to Moore’s Law. But there’s also no question that, given different policies for the past half century, things could be much further along than they are. We may not (as Monte Davis noted in comments over there) have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey by 2001, or even now, but we’d be on a lot clearer path to it, I think.

But that has never been a societal goal, even when we were pouring four percent of the federal budget (and doesn’t that make the NASA fanboys drool) into the problem during Apollo. We were just trying to beat the Russkies to the moon, and after we did that, we got preoccupied, and public-choice economics took over, as it always does when things aren’t important any more. And that’s the way it’s been ever since. But because of false myths promulgated during that era, it’s been tough to raise the money privately as well.

It won’t happen as fast as we’d like it to, nor will it happen as slowly as those who continue to cheer for government spaceflight expect, either. And most importantly, it will have trouble keeping up with the electronics singularity (though a lot of those advances will eventually accelerate space technology as well, and it will happen much sooner than most expect).

But I think that we are seeing real, measurable progress now, and I expect it to continue, and to continue to confound those who continue to cheer NASA five- and ten-year plans.

Technology and Society

Needlessly Annoying

10 Comments

I just entered my account number at Chevron/Texaco’s site, in order to recover a lost user name. The form to do so simply has a text box saying “Account Number.” When I look at my account number on my bill, as printed by them, it is a sequence of numbers separated by hyphens, so I type it in as they give it to me on my bill. So of course, it kicks out an error message, telling me not to include any dashes or spaces.

I find it easier to separate the subnumbers, because it makes the number easier to read and verify. Back when I was doing web site ecommerce (over a decade ago), I found it a trivial task to write a line of perl that would strip out extraneous characters, and convert the string to a pure string of digits. Has the technology degraded since then to the point that they have to annoy their customers by making them enter a perfectly valid number twice?

Space

A Space Race With China?

10 Comments

Jeff Foust lays out the case, pro and con. As he points out, there is a lot of ignorance and misinterpretation in this area, on both sides. I don’t think that we’re in a race, and if and when we are, it will become clear long before it’s “too late,” in any sense. We will not be surprised by a Chinese lunar landing.

As noted previously, the real race is not between governments, but between plodding politicized bureaucracies and cash-starved private space enterprises.

And I found this bit amusing:

It is difficult, though, to get a handle on some information, such as exactly how much money China spends on its space program; estimates vary widely and even Chinese officials have said that their budgets are “very complicated…”

Does that distinguish them in any useful way from NASA’s?

Science And Society, Technology and Society

A Cure For Diabetes?

3 Comments

It seems to work in mice:

Last year, Dr Terry Strom and his team demonstrated that they could stop the on-going destruction of insulin-producing beta cells in mice using a combination of three drugs, although they were unable to regenerate the cells.

However, when they added an extra ingredient – an enzyme called alpha 1 anti-trypsin – a significant rise in the number of beta cells was seen.

I’m not sure what the point is here:

It is exciting that these drugs could stop the immune system from attacking insulin-producing cells, but it is too early to tell whether these cells recovered in the mice or if new cells were produced.

Does it matter, from a practical standpoint? I can understand why the researchers would be curious, but a cure is a cure.

Anyway, here’s hoping that it can work in higher mammals.

History, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Confused

11 Comments

Selena Zito writes that all of the remaining presidential candidates are Scots-Irish.

Really? This is the first I’d heard that Hillary! was of Scots-Irish descent. I’d always assumed that she was from Puritan stock. That’s the way she’s always acted. And Obama is obviously, at best, only half Scots-Irish.

Zito doesn’t seem to quite get the concept, either:

How can there be such scant understanding of a 30 million-strong ethnic group that has produced so many leaders and swung most elections?

Perhaps because political academics and pollsters parse the Scottish half off with the WASP vote and define the Irish-Catholic half as blue-collar Democrats. They are neither.

There is no “Irish-Catholic half” of the Scots-Irish. Scots-Irish aren’t Irish at all. Neither are they Scottish. They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic. They were also a violent people with an honor culture, mercenaries from the border area between England and Scotland. As the article notes, they were sent by the English to colonize Ulster, to get them out of Britain after the war between England and Scotland was settled and they had no more need for them. The ones too violent for Ulster were shipped off to America, so they’re a double distillation of the most violent culture that the British Isles produced. After they fought (mostly for the South) in the Civil War, many of them headed out west.

People who think that America is too violent blame it on the proliferation of guns. But they confuse cause and effect. We have a lot of guns because we have a lot of Scots-Irish (aka rednecks). But it comes in pretty handy during war time.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society

Proves Her Point About The Math Thing

11 Comments

Charlotte Allen is embarrassed to be a woman. She gets the math wrong here, though:

Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women.

Since the statistic is on a per-mile basis, the fact that men drive more miles a year is irrelevant. So the disparity–5.1 versus 5.7–is actually quite small, and perhaps within the statistical error.

Of course, the thing that statistics like this don’t reveal is how many accidents they cause, unbeknownst to them, because they are oblivious to their surroundings. I’m always bemused by someone who I know to be a terrible driver bragging about the fact that they’ve never had an accident. Not to imply that men don’t do this as well, of course.

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