Mambo Taxi

ARPANET, it is claimed, was born on October 29, 1969, and the first message sent was supposed to be "login", but it crashed before they got to "g."

I learned this in today's Globe and Mail, which comes to me on large sheets of bleached paper printed with soy inks. Yeah- woah.

ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, became DARPA, a Defense projects agency, the year before I was born. It was the parent agency responsible for GPS, Gallium Arsenide integrated circuits, and of course for the Internet.

They are also responsible for stealth bombers and the mechanical elephants that ravaged Vietnam and led America to military victory oh wait maybe not.

Some months ago, I read an opinion piece (I wish I remember where) claiming that DARPA held [edited to clarify] distinction among US government agencies for successfully funding innovative R&D for over 50 years. DARPA goes for high-risk/high-reward projects, with flat hierarchy, tiny labour pool (fewer than 150 employees), and a distributed development model. "Cool," thought I, "if only they cloned the model for non-military agencies."

This evening (in googleblog) I learned of ARPA-E, which hopes to have the same success in the Energy sector. Visiting his friends at Google Headquarters, the US Energy Secretary announced $150 million in grants, high-gamble projects in projects like energy storage, carbon capture, fuels, and desalination.

[Checks watch]

C'mon folks, it's been two days already.

(ARPA-E was actually created in 2007, but it didn't get kicked into gear until it got its first budget in Obama's first few weeks on the job.)

[Checks watch]

C'MON already!

I just attended a thought-provoking talk by Stewart Brand, on the topic of his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. In capsule form: the formerly back-to-the-land ecologist makes a strong argument for pro-city, pro-nuclear power, pro-genetically modified food, and pro-geoengineering strategies for mitigating the damage we're currently doing to our planet.

I took a few notes, but I recommend anyone with interest to watch the talk, as it is already up on the web; it's approx. 45 minutes for the talk, 15 minutes of questions. (you'll want to fast-forward to the 2-minute mark).

Things he said which struck me as interesting, though I've done no follow-up research:

- The Darfur war can be argued to be rooted in an environmental catastrophe- they ran out of water; which I knew. But he then showed a map of the Himalayas; its glaciers provide much of the water for Pakistan, through India. Hm.

- 2009 was the first time 50% of the world's population live in cities. Projection of the world's ten largest cities in 2015: only one, NYC, is in the West.

- Discussing new immigrants to cities India; "As an environmentalist, I don't want to stand in their way."

- "Megatons to Megawatts"- 10% of energy in the US is currently generated by energy from decommissioned Soviet nuclear warheads. He thinks this as one of the most amazing swords-to-plowshares stories of our time.

- Environmentalists who know the most are the most strident about the dangers. On nuclear power, those who know the most are least strident.

- 4th generation nuclear power reactors are now commercially viable; these include "microreactors" which are self-contained capsules, many designs are meltdown-proof, and one could easily power a small city. One prototype he likes uses thorium as the reactant, which is 3-4 times more abundant than uranium and produces several orders of magnitude less long-lived radioactive waste. Watch this space.

- There is now an undyed blue rose; a GM product with genes from petunias. You can buy them in Japan for $20 a stem.

- Geoengineering may be the most effective means to lower global temperatures- introducing particles into the stratosphere has been happening for Earth's entire history. When Mt. Pinatubo blew, it lowered temperatures 3 degrees for a year; and biologists talk about "Pinatubo cubs"- a population boom of polar bears from that winter.

---

I'm curious what people think of his talk, and what struck you from it. I will probably read his new book.

I realize how much impact his older works have had on me. To begin with, The Whole Earth Catalog probably had big impact on my parents; some of the designs he talked about were things they tried (solar water heating, back-to-the-land-ism). I might be lucky I didn't grow up in a yurt. But I spent a long while reading the Whole Earth Catalog as a kid, and his book on the MIT Media Lab did strongly shape my high-school plans for what I wanted to study. I also realize that the flavour of much of his writing- an imperative to improve one's life with better tools; an environmentalism based on the latest science; and elements of hippie collectivism- have stuck with me. Of course not only through him as a source, but I think he does rightly hold a title of "visionary."

Also, idiosyncratic crazy guy, who puts arrows all over his annotations, but whatever.

I finished the audio-book version of Stumbling on Happiness on the drive back from my parents' place.

I wrote about Daniel Gilbert last August when he was interviewed on Tapestry, the CBC radio program on faith and spirituality (and so did d., which I link to from that post). Re-reading my impressions at the time, I conclude his book made a much better impression on me than it appears his radio-interview and TED lecture did. In no small part because he was able to set out his arguments completely, not constrained to 30 or 20 minutes. (Good gawd, he sounds strident and pressed for time in the TED talk.)

I took out of the library both his book and the unabridged audio version (read by Gilbert). The book copy was recalled so I only read a few chapters in print. I recommend either, or both. It made a fine accompaniment to driving many hours on the 401.

The book is pleasantly engaging, with a very accessible style that I only occasionally wish had been more terse. He mixes in with his psychology research a smattering of jokes I actually found funny- occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

I'm torn on how much I'd like to say about the content. Others will have written better than I can. I think Gilbert writes most effectively about unexpected psych research results. For example (and this isn't an exhaustive list of the good stuff, it's just off the top of my head) :

* People overestimate their emotional reactions to future events. Our psychological "immune system" kicks in when awful things happen, making them feel... bad, but not as bad as you'd expect them to.

* However, the psychological immune system won't kick in under a certain threshhold. So a slightly bad event can fester in your mind worse than a really bad event.

* We, obviously, edit our memories; and we do so in a way to self-validate our beliefs. The fascinating thing to me is that we also edit our predictions of our feelings from before-hand, so we can self-validate the way we ended up feeling. "We remember feeling the way we thought we would feel, whether we felt like that or not." We're really a mess when it comes to accurately remembering feelings, and Gilbert mentions a few "emotional blind-spots" which consistently trip us up.

I liked this interview with him; it gives a fair sense of his writing style.

Something else I appreciate: when I got to the end, I wished I had a study group to help hash out my thoughts on the book. It turns out, and I think I read this last year, that Gilbert posted a study guide to go along with the Harvard frosh class he teaches based on the book. I can probably get access to most of the articles he cites.

So I'm pondering whether to try and find a dozen other people who just read this book and see what we might do with it.

Conventional wisdom is that human natural selection has dropped off and evolution is slow in modern humans, because there's fewer selective pressures. By analysis of Haplotype Mapping project data, UW-Madison anthropologist John Hawks says that's backwards- we've been evolving 100 times faster over the last 5,000 years than any previous period in human history.


The researchers found evidence of recent selection on approximately 1,800 genes, or 7 percent of all human genes.

[...]

Genetic changes are now being driven by major changes in human culture. One good example is lactase, the gene that helps people digest milk. This gene normally declines and stops activity about the time one becomes a teenager, Hawks says. But northern Europeans developed a variation of the gene that allowed them to drink milk their whole lives — a relatively new adaptation that is directly tied to the advance of domestic farming and use of milk as an agricultural product.

The biggest new pathway for selection relates to disease resistance, Hawks says. As people starting living in much larger groups and settling in one place roughly 10,000 years ago, epidemic diseases such as malaria, smallpox and cholera began to dramatically shift mortality patterns in people. Malaria is one of the clearest examples, Hawks says, given that there are now more than two dozen identified genetic adaptations that relate to malaria resistance, including an entirely new blood type known as the Duffy blood type.

Another recently discovered gene, CCR5, originated about 4,000 years ago and now exists in about 10 percent of the European population. It was discovered recently because it makes people resistant to HIV/AIDS. But its original value might have come from obstructing the pathway for smallpox.



Seen via gmsv_feed.

(And hey! I can follow this article; some of melted_snowball's explanations of what he does for a living may have rubbed off on me after all.)

http://www.badscience.net/2007/11/make-your-own-id/

Biometric fingerprint data's not as secure as you might hope. Not only can it be foiled by a gelatin cast of your finger, or even a digital photo of your fingerprint turned into a geletin cast of your finger, but apparently the numeric conversion of your finger's data, stored in the biometric database, or on your ID card, or what have you, can be translated back into your fingerprint according to a paper by mathematicians at MSU. Check that link for details- and a MythBusters episode where they make a gelatin fingerprint and go around foiling locks with it.

(As it happens, my cousin Simon is a sociologist who writes about the unreliability of forensic fingerprinting. It's a neat topic!)

Thanks to rhythmaning for pointing to the article and reminding me about Ben Goldacre's blog / Guardian column, bad_science. I used to read his column, back before RSS feeds. :)

Speaking of awful security, I can't imagine how angry I would be if my data (or my children's) were on those lost CDs in the UK post. Angry and scared, most likely.

Indeed, I wonder who's stupid enough to send around unencrypted CDs by the non-registerd postal service here in North America.