The Human Brain, Still Champion

In most people’s minds, computers can ‘think’ far faster than the human mind. But is that really true? consider just what happens in the human mind during a conversation:

1. The ears must detect the variations in air pressure, convert it to a electronic signal and send it over the nervous system to the auditory processing center of the brain.

2. The auditory processing center must decode that message and determine if the sound was a word, after filtering out random background noises cause by the wind, a bird call, nearby machinery, or what have you. This is no small trick, and computers today still have problems in this area.

3. Now the speech/language center of the brain gets involved. It must determine what that word was, link it to any prior words, and do a lookup of the meaning of the word, before delivering the result to the prefrontal lobe as something that needs to be looked at by the ‘consciousness’.

4. Now the ‘you’, the ‘thinking’ part, has to take this piece of information, link it with the database storage of your entire life experience, cross-correlate and index it with all that information to help determine what that word means to you and what associations you have with that meaning, and add the visuals: who are you talking to, what is their facial expression, their body language, the tonal quality of the word - all things which may modify the exact meaning of what has been said. And note that the visual processing involves at least as many steps as does the auditory, and is being performed simultaneously to give your consciousness that complete, real-time picture of what is happening.

5. All the words must be processed to determine the actual complete sense of what has been said to you, so now the short-term memory storage must also be accessed, bringing with it the entire gamut of information that was associated with each of the prior words that had been processed.

6. A response must be composed. Once more, both short and long term memory must be accessed, appropriate words chosen to convey the desired meaning, and signals sent to motor controls for throat , lungs, voice-box, lips, and mouth to actually deliver the response.

Given that average speech rates are 200-300 words per minute, this means average word generation is taking about 200 milliseconds. Which means, when you look at the individual actions taken by the brain and associated nervous system, that they are processing things in micro-, or perhaps even nano-, second time frames. This compares quite favorably with most computer speeds.

But you say that computers can calculate arithmetical sums far faster and far more accurately than people! While this is normally true (but just look at what some so-called ‘lightning calculator’ humans can do as a comparison stick), it ignores the fact that computers are extremely single minded - even those programmed to do multi-threaded multi-tasking. The human brain continuously processes, weighs, and forms decision trees about a tremendous amount of information from the ‘outside’ world, integrating it to a gestalt map that informs and influences everything we do or say. And it is in exactly this area that computers compare poorly to humans, and why it’s still true that we haven’t yet built anything that even approaches what most would call a true ‘artificial’ intelligence.

Now part of this gap is a deficiency in how we program computers, an item that is continuously being worked on, with improvements constantly being made, but these improvements, so far at least, have been coming at a pretty linear rate - no great ahas! that have taking computer processing up in giant leaps. Part of the reason for this is that we still don’t understand just exactly how the human brain does what it does, so making a computer mimic it is a little bit of a guessing game. Until we gain a better understanding of just how the brain functions, I don’t think anything like Asimov’s autonomous robots are going to arrive.

So we have a few years, at least, until Colossus takes over the world, and we all end up as slaves to it.

Was Chicken Little Right?

The doom-and-gloom crowd has been predicting that we’ll run out of oil real soon now for a long time. I can remember articles in the sixties that predicted this would happen by 1990, more articles in seventies that pushed this out another ten years, and current articles that peg the date at 2040. Obviously, at least so far, this hasn’t happened. And I doubt that the 2040 date will be any more accurate that the prior predictions. But what has happened is that the price of oil has now reached the point that alternative energy generation methods are beginning to become cost competitive. Never mind that the current price is probably artificially inflated by speculators and cartels that are only looking to get theirs while the getting is good, in real terms it has become more expensive to find, drill, extract, and refine oil. There truly is less readily available (read: cheap) oil to be found out there, so the current price is unlikely to decline very much.

As our current high-tech society is very much dependent on this energy source, is it perhaps time to really start worrying? The answer to that depends on what the alternatives are, and how diligently we investigate these alternatives. So far, the considered alternatives are wind, solar, hydro-electric, fuel cell, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, biomass, and tidal. Let’s look at each of these and see just how far they’ll go towards providing the world with both cheap and reliable power.

Wind power: Lot’s of energy available here. Winds are basically generated by two major factors, the solar influx and the Earth’s spin, neither of which are going away anytime soon. Capturing this energy in significant amounts is another story. There are few places in the world that have steady winds high enough to justify the cost of the high tech windmills that can efficiently turn that wind power into electricity. Currently, wind power provides less than 1% of electricity production in the U.S. If all possible sites for wind power were developed, it could provide perhaps 20% of the electricity demand, but there are two problems with this. First is that these wind farms would then occupy something like 300,000 square miles of land area. As the U.S. has only 3.7 million square miles of land, this represents something like 8% of all the land, most of which is used for other purposes right now. Second is the problem that the energy produced is a) highly variable b) not easily stored, meaning it has to used when it is produced.

Hydro-Electric, currently providing about 11% of the electricity demand, has similar problems, along with the fact that most of the available hydro-power sites are already in use, and to add more would cause significant changes to the ecologies of the areas around them.

Fuel cells are not net energy producers. It takes more energy to produce the hydrogen used than the fuel cell will deliver. They are a partial answer to the problem of storing energy, and at least can be considered partially mobile if placed in cars. If we can generate enough energy via other means, then these items would be a possible replacement for all the oil we gobble up as gasoline. However, the distribution channels for hydrogen are not in place, and building up the infrastructure necessary represents a large investment in both time and money.

Bio-mass generation has similar problems as those of fuel cells, as it takes more energy to grow and process the plant material needed than will be generated by the final product. It has an advantage in that it won’t require a whole new infrastructure to distribute the end product, but once again the total land area required to grow the necessary material is a significant fraction of our total land area, and would force out farmland currently used to grow edible crops - something we are already seeing in the price of basic foodstuffs in the grocery store. However, this type of technology also provides us with a way to make the oils we need for things other than power generation: lubricants, ingredients in plastics, and other such uses. If crude oil really does run out or becomes prohibitively expensive to get, this avenue is available, and additional research and technological improvements need to be actively pursued.

Tidal power is a non-starter with today’s technology. While there’s a lot of energy in the tides, in most places of the world this energy is very diffuse. Only in few bays is there enough of a water height differential to make energy generation efficient or possible.

Nuclear fission power is an option. It is possible for us to generated a much larger fraction of our energy needs this way than we currently do, but once again there are significant costs and risks associated with going down this route, not the least of which is the spent material disposal problem, along with the terrorist/crazy factor. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, just isn’t possible today. We really haven’t solved the technological issues with this one yet, and probably won’t for some time, even though they’ve been predicting it’s advent as 15 years from the present for the last forty years. If it ever does become a reality that can actually produce more power than what it takes to generate the reaction, it might become the ultimate savior of our high-tech civilization, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Which leaves solar power as a possible solution. Solar comes in couple of different flavors: direct electricity generation, and as a heat source to drive conventional generators. The heating method is fairly simple, and can be of great use in relatively undeveloped nations, but it is not terribly efficient. Direct conversion shows more promise, though current solar cell efficiency is really not high enough to make it cost competitive with other generation methods. But calculations of the potential energy available show that, yes, it can provide enough power, assuming we wish to the cover the state of Arizona with solar panels, along with every housetop in America. There is still the problem of variable generation (no power produced at night!), the same problem that plagues some of the other potential generation methods. Some better means of storing energy must be found - battery technology is right now not anywhere near to being able to handle this.

Or there is one other alternative: put your solar generation plant in space, where the sun shines all the time, where there is plenty of room not needed for other purposes, and microwave the resultant power down to the ground. This is the option I’d like to put my money on and into, but so far at least it doesn’t seem as if there is any real work being done to make this happen, even though it’s within our technological capability. It would just take an astronomical (pun intended) amount to build it. Our average citizen complains about the amount of money being used for space exploration, as they see no direct benefit from it (we’re just throwing dollars into space!). Science fiction stories have been touting the benefits available from space for a long time, but those who read the stuff represent a very tiny fraction of the entire populace, and it’s still “Buck Rogers stuff” for most. Perhaps if they could be shown how it would directly affect their pocketbook via their power bill they might be more willing to spend more to make true space industry an economically feasible  reality.

The world’s energy demand is not going down. If we don’t wish to see our way of life collapse into wars over a declining resource, or subside into just making-do, with a lower standard of living for all, real work must be done to find appropriate energy sources, all the while keeping in mind just what is ultimately possible with any particular technology and what its total costs are.

Predicting the Future

Besides all of its other great qualities as a novel, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, written almost 50 years ago, had one great technological prediction, that of powered armor suits for the poor foot soldier. These suits, in addition to greatly multiplying the effective physical strength of the soldier and provide at least some protection against stray bullets, also had weapon racks for carrying and launching some really heavy-duty firepower, head’s-up displays of the tactical situation, and multiple comm-link channels to allow the soldier to stay in constant communication with his buddies and the higher ups. Now, at least part of that prediction is coming true. Under contract for the U. S. Army, the first prototype exoskeletons, unimaginatively named the XOS, that can help increase the soldier’s effective physical strength have been developed.

There’s obviously still a long way to go before reaching anything close to Heinlein’s vision, but it’s at least a start.

So how did Heinlein come up with such a prediction in the first place? Basically I think he looked at what a foot soldier really needed to aid the soldier in his mission, and designed his suit around those requirements, not paying any attention to the then current state of technology or how it would be possible to physically implement such a gadget, other than some hand-waving about negative feedback systems. He did much the same thing in The Door Into Summer, where he predicted the invention of robots specifically designed to do household chores, which has also become partially real, with the introduction of the Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Which is probably not a bad way to come up with a new gadget in the real world. Figure out what you need, then worry about the implementation details. But it works really well in the world of science fiction, as all those pesky implementation details can be ignored.

Will the Real Science Data Please Stand Up?

We are bombarded on a daily basis with the latest scientific research results. Anything from what stem cell usage might mean towards treatments for various ailments, space probe data pointing towards life elsewhere, new ‘global warming’ data in either support or disagreement with this hypothesis, new fossil data and how it supports one or another competing models of evolution, which foods have the greatest potential for prolonging (or shortening) life-spans (and this list changes constantly, with the former favorites turning to bottom-feeders and vice versa), DNA clues to how life works, the latest advances in computer speed, new ‘Grand Unified Field’ theories fueled by new astrophysical observations, the dangers of genetic manipulation and whichever virus of the day is seen as being a new great threat, the latest wonder drug - the list goes on and on. The total mass of this data is not surprising; after all, science still seems to be riding an exponential curve in terms of discoveries.

The trouble is, 99% of this information comes to us as filtered by the media. And most media outlets have a) a poor understanding of the science and b) a need to present this information in the most sensational way possible. After all, they are in the business of selling information. Which means that the average person often gets a very distorted view of what is really going on. Couple this with that same person’s own poor understanding of science and how it works, and you have a basic recipe for conclusions and plans that are not based in reality.

The current global warming flap is a good example of this. Most scientists would be the first ones to say that the current theories are trying to model what is a very complex system, with far more variables than most theories try to tackle, and that it is difficult to apply normal scientific methods, as there are very few laboratory experiments that can be done to verify or disprove most aspects of this - instead they must rely on the ‘open air’ data that the entire world can provide, and this data has highly varying degrees of verifiable accuracy. This leads to warring factions within the scientific community, as various people focus on one or another aspect of the available data and how well it fits their chosen hypothesis. Consensus on the extent and cause of the perceived problem has been slow, and there is still a contingent that violently disagrees with the current consensus view.

But it is rare that the media coverage explores these disagreements within the scientific community with any depth. Far too much of the coverage highlights the ’scare’ factor - “New York city will be under 20 feet of water by the end of the century!”, and rarely gives more than a short summary of the underlying data and assumptions behind that prediction. The scientific community itself must take part of the blame for this. Far too often, scientists will make statements to the press or hand out short excerpts from their papers, leaving out the hard data on which their statements are based. It doesn’t have to be this way in today’s internet age. On line articles should include links not only to the summary statement, but to the complete paper that the scientist has probably submitted to the appropriate organization for peer review. But when such links are given, all too often when you try to open those links, you find have to pay some sort of fee or be a member of some professional society to access the complete paper - at which point most people give up, and rely on the summary only.

This is not to say that most people can actually understand the original complete paper. Few have the training to understand the data, reasoning, and methods that such papers typically present. But for those that do, having such access would at least provide a much larger set of eyes looking critically at the data, able to see possible variances from the given hypothesis, or outlying data points that the theory doesn’t explain properly or completely, and be able to come up with a better assessment of just what level of confidence can be placed in the theory’s predictions - the critical item in determining what to do about it.

Science via media/sound bite doesn’t cut it. Political and economic decisions based on such partial and filtered information is just asking for a disaster.

Space, The Final Frontier

Recently Charles Stross posted an article about how we’ll never get around to colonizing the other planets in the solar system, let alone interstellar colonization, citing the extraordinary cost, technological difficulty, and very poor return on investment as reasons. He also pooh-poohs the idea that we’ll do it anyway just because it’s there. Now while his numbers are very probably correct given today’s level of technology, I think he is seriously underestimating the drive towards going where we’ve never been before, to make a new home far away from the old homestead.

Mars is the obvious logical choice out of all the sundry rocks in the solar system, as it is close enough to a human friendly environment that is fairly easy to see what steps would be necessary to make it into something where we can actually live. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red, Blue, & Green Mars set lays out these steps in admirable fashion, although it’s quite probable that the time frame he envisions is way too short to actually achieve that goal (although at least one scientist thinks we could be well down that path by the end of this century). Could we do it with today’s technology? Probably not. But the pace of progress shows no signs of slowing down, and if we can get to the point where a space elevator is a real possibility, it will remove one of the greatest impediments to this task, that of having to lift large quantities of various necessary tools and biomasses out of Earth’s deep gravity well with something as inefficient and dangerous as rocket power. Lacking such an item right now, exploration by both robot probe and manned missions is not only doable, but necessary, and we can leave the colonization for a little later.

Of course, the limiting factor here is not really technology, but money (of course, the better the technology, the less it will cost). Who is going to fund all of this? NASA’s mandate and budget will only stretch so far. And while there are always a few with visionary dreams, the average taxpayer doesn’t see much point to spending all this money to investigate a world that seems to be populated with nothing but some very uninteresting rocks. But it is precisely those who have that visionary dream, coupled with a few individuals who have some really deep money pockets who either share that dream or can be convinced of its value, that will really drive this. This is happening now, as private ventures towards developing an economical space plane have already shown.

There has always been a small segment of the human population that is just not satisfied with the status quo, who want to see what’s over that next hill, who will endure great deprivation in search of such dreams. Without such people, humanity would become stagnant and ingrown, always worrying about the local problem of the day, and missing one of the grander aspects of what it is to be human. Stross is wrong. We will colonize our solar system, as there will always be a few of us who don’t count the cost.

Creationism and the Scalzi Challenge

Haven’t posted for a while due to another bout of 12 hour/7days a week workitus. I’m getting too old for this kind of schedule…

But reading over on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog, I discover that the Creation Museum has just opened. John, in his typical Scalzi snarky way, has managed to stir up his readership to get him to go visit said museum, if they will just contribute enough to make it worth his while (see here). Contributions towards this educational trip will go to the Americans United for Separation of Church and State organization. For another look at what this museum offers, the folks at Ars Technica have this.

Now, if those who believe in Creationism wish to educate their children in the privacy of their homes in the tenets of this ideology, that’s their business. If they wish to advertise it via this museum, which people can go and visit based strictly on their own personal wishes to do so, that’s their business. If they wish to get this stuff put into science textbooks that will be used at public schools, that’ s not their business, it’s yours and mine. Americans already have a tough time keeping up with the rest of world in terms of scientific knowledge and investigation, and confusing students with faith-based material certainly will not help in this regard. Separation of church and state (and in this case, ’state’ very definitely includes public schools) is a very good idea, not the least of which is that when ‘faith’ takes control of a government, there can be no opposition, as obviously those of the faith will reject (in sometimes very bloody ways) any dissension as not coming from their deity, and they have the absolutely correct answers.

How science works is not perfect. It doesn’t always look objectively at new data and theories, and sometimes advocates of new ideas are ignored or pilloried. But it does eventually get around to looking at that new data, and old ideas will get tossed out to be replaced by better ideas that fit all the known facts a bit more closely. The closer the theories match how the world really works, the better for all of us, as these theories form the basis for all the fancy technological goodies that make our lives richer and more rewarding, with less of our time spent on the mundane problems of surviving. Science is basically about asking questions, and the mindset that asks and allows for questions helps to not only keep our government healthy, but allows all of us to live our lives in the way we wish.

So go visit Scalzi’s site, and contribute to his trip if you feel so inspired. If nothing else, the end result should be some entertaining reading.

Private Memories?

Charles Stross, author of Acclerando and Glasshouse, has posted an interesting article on what he sees as the direction of the future. He notes the continuing acceleration of developments in memory storage and bandwidth, and takes a flyer from this to the idea of completely recording every single moment of your life. Now while such a thing may be technically achievable (and he presents a good case that it not only could be done, but done quite cheaply for every single human on the planet), the question I have is would people really want to do this?

Now everyone has some memorable moment(s) in their lives that they’d like to preserve - usually what are considered ‘life markers’, the weddings, graduations, births, etc. And there is some usage for this concept as a memory aid, especially for those suffering from (or who might be prone to) Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive problems. But record everything? Other than a few extreme exhibitionists, I don’t think so. Because once recorded, it’s subject to being viewed by others, and some of those others probably don’t have your best interests at heart: the police looking for whatever crimes you may have committed (and everyone has committed some crime in their lives, even if it’s as pedestrian as jay-walking), crooks looking for ways to relieve you of your wealth, or your spouse looking for lapses in your fidelity. As Stross notes, having this capability would mean the effective end to any privacy, given that to make it happen, recording devices would need to be everywhere.

What’s frightening about this is that the beginnings of this can be seen right here and now. Almost every store you enter has surveillance cameras, more and more stop lights are being equipped with picture-taking cameras, RFID tags are being embedding in more and more products, the mobile phone cameras that everyone seems to possess nowadays, GPS trackers in cars, every key stroke and mouse click you perform on the web can already be recorded (along with complete monitoring of your PC actions at your workplace), and it’s been possible to marry up medical, financial, purchase history, web browsing, and school records to get a pretty complete profile of someone for some time. As one of the commenters to Stross’ article indicated, the US Constitution is silent on the right to privacy - the Supreme Court has often held in its rulings that there is an implied right, but such is not spelled out in the master document. With the future barreling down upon us, and what privacy we have being nibbled away by more and more gadgets, perhaps we need to start lobbying for a constitutional amendment to make this right explicit. Unless you really want everything you do visible to the whole wide world.

Mobile Phone-Phobic Bees

A new theory has surfaced to explain the bee die-off I wrote about earlier. It would seem there is at least some evidence that bees do not like mobile phones, and won’t return to a hive that has one near it. So far, though, I would class this as a hypothesis that needs a lot more direct research before indicting this modern ‘necessity’. But it is very worrying that this problem has spread to Europe.

I’m reminded of one of the better sf disaster novels, John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, where a bio-weapon got out of hand and ended up destroying most of the world’s grain crops. While the current bee crisis has certainly not reached the level of disaster of that book, it is certainly pointing out that we simply do not know enough about all the interactions of the world ecology, and the fragility of the world food supply to the effects of unforeseen consequences of technology, mutations, chemicals, or habitat and/or climate modification.

If this problem continues to spread, it would appear that it would be something that needs attention now, although so far it has not grabbed very much press coverage, as opposed to the constant shrieking about global warming, which, while also needing attention, is a much longer-term problem.

Little Guys Make a Difference

People like to think that they represent the apex of living things on this planet. But in some ways we’re totally outclassed by some pretty tiny life forms, namely insects. In terms of sheer numbers, we don’t even come close. And insects have been around a lot longer than people; many species are basically unchanged from what they were like sixty million years ago - a pretty good marker for just how successful they have been and how well integrated into their ecological niche they are. Clifford Simak, way back in the forties in the novel City, asked what would happen if you could jump start one variety of insect, the ant, out of its evolutionary fixed point - with the result that our Earth was eventually taken over by an ant civilization, a somewhat frightening example of just how much potential insects have. But as annoying and pestiferous as some insects are, they are also very essential to us, as without them large portions of the ecology would collapse. And some of them are very important to us economically, most especially bees.

Now while your first thought about bees might be honey or sting, bees are the workhorses of flowering plant pollination. While some pollination occurs via wind, ants, arachnids, and larger animal transport, the great majority of this function is accomplished by bees. And without this pollination, most of our fresh fruit and many other staple crops would cease to exist.  And lately, it seems that bees are in trouble.  A mysterious disease has apparently started attacking the colonies throughout much of the United States, in some areas causing the die off of 90% of the local colonies. The cause, so far, is unknown, with suggestions ranging from an imported disease from Australia to the dreaded ‘global warming’ (though so far there hasn’t been much credence given to the latter possibility). As of yet, the ‘killer’ Africanized hybrid bee doesn’t seem to be affected, but without knowing the cause for the current die off, there’s no guarantee that they won’t succumb also.

At least part of the current problem is too great a reliance on a single species of bee by many farmers. Knowledge of other ecological disasters would indicate that, like most things, we should not be placing all our eggs in one basket.  And once again, a strong look should be made at just what chemicals, pesticides, and imported foreign species we’re adding to the environment, as clearly we don’t know enough yet to manually manage an ecology (and can’t even properly computer simulate it); we simply don’t know what unintended effects a single change to an environment will have. Obviously more research (and dollars to fund said research) is needed. But regardless of how quickly we can come up with an answer to the current problem, it’s already so far advanced that you can expect higher fruit prices this summer.
So be nice to our little invertebrate friends, or you just might find your dinner table awfully bare.

The Value of Blogging

The blogosphere continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Some estimates put the current number of US hosted blogs at 60 million. This is a significant portion of the population, even if you remove from consideration the number of foreign bloggers, ’spam’ blogs, inactive, and duplicated blogs - the number would probably still be something like 30 million. Some questions come to mind about this phenomenon:

1. What do all these people have to say? What subjects are hot?

2. Why has this medium grown so fast?

3. What value does it have versus things like print media? Will it eventually push things like newspapers to oblivion?

There may not be definitive answers to the above, but some things are fairly clear. People are writing about whatever strikes their fancy, from butterflies to canned soup, but some of the most popular topics are, not surprisingly, politics, wars, economics, and religion. A good chunk of these postings may not add much to the world’s understanding of causes and fixes for problems, and some of this material is poorly researched and validated, but at the very least some of these posts rival any information obtainable from more traditional sources, and also provide a good snapshot of current mass opinion on a host of issues that politicians had better be paying attention to. But there is also one subject area that is somewhat unique to blogosphere, namely computer-related material, reviews of this or that software, hosting facilities, how to get things done in the computer world. The depth of this material ranges from stuff for neophytes to some very sophisticated analysis of stuff that only propeller-heads are likely to understand. Certainly there are magazines and such devoted to this type of thing, but all too often reviews of software in these media are commissioned for pay, and are neither totally unbiased nor have they received testing on the incredible variety of computer platforms that exist today, so these blog posts serve a very useful purpose.

Which leads to at least a partial answer to why blogging has grown so quickly: it is filling a very real need for unbiased information that is relevant to its audience. But there are several other reasons which are possibly even more important. The first of these is the sense of community that the blogosphere engenders. Americans from the fifties to the nineties seem to be growing more and more isolated from each other (quick, now, when was the last time you had a substantive conversation with your neighbor?), grew inward to concerns about only their own families, and seemed to lose connection with their wider community. This seems to have left a feeling of there being something lacking in everyone’s daily living, and blogging has provided a means for filling at least one part of that hole, a way to connect to many other people in a non-threatening manner. To some degree, the blogosphere has become the new town-hall meeting or the gathering in the old hardware store. The other part of this is the feeling of empowerment; people who have felt that their opinions and their voice were not being heard can now get these words out there for the whole world to see, and the feedback that they can get is a validation that what they are saying is being heard and matters.

Now many established professional writers and journalists have denigrated the value of blogs, stating that they simply cannot match the accuracy of the work that they do, and can in fact lead to some very dangerous and unsupportable allegations and misstatements of fact (and there have even been a few lawsuits challenging just what can and can’t be said on a blog). It’s certainly true that getting all your news from reading blogs is probably not a good idea; that what you see in one place should be checked via some other source of information. But it’s also true that the sheer number of people involved in this means that subjects will be tackled that traditional print and TV media simply don’t have time or space for, and that benefits everyone. I doubt that blogs will ever completely do away with traditional media; there will probably always be a place for people who are dedicated to the full-time work of determining and reporting the facts, but neither should bloggers be dismissed as not having the chops to present issues that need to be addressed in a timely and well-written manner.

Which brings me to my final point. At least part of the allure of blogging is the dream that many people have of being a professional writer. Blogging lets people put their attempts at writing out there for all the world to see, without having to wait years to see it in print or submit their work to sometimes crotchety editors who insist on proper grammar and well-organized material. Of course this leads to some blogs that are almost unreadable and of little or no value. But the great majority of the ones I see, anyway, show a proper respect for the written word, and frequently do present their material in both a logical and persuasive manner. Such work shows me that that there are far more people out there than those who do get published who can write well enough that they could be published. The limitation is just how many things the publishing industry can produce and sell. It’s quite noticeable that since the advent of print-on-demand and cheap vanity publishers that the number of published books has risen steeply. Much of what is published today may not be world-class literature, and it’s certainly true that many self-published books could have used the services of a good editor, but at the same time I can’t help but think that the more things get recorded via the written word, the more our culture benefits.

Home, Sweet Home for Dinosaurs

Scientists have now discovered den-digging, burrowing dinosaurs. This news alone is not earth-shattering, and probably is of direct interest only to a very few. However, it adds one more point in what is known about dinosaurs and the environment they lived in, and with each such point that is added, it becomes clearer that during their heyday the dinosaurs occupied just about every possible ecological animal niche. To my mind, at least, this is strong evidence in support of the theory of evolution, as it is possible to track the spread of dinosaurs throughout these ecological niches over the course of time, and also shows just how competition for resources favors those new animal variants that can best take advantage of some particular feature, eventually resulting in completely new species.

This view of the world does not eliminate the possibility of the world/universe being created by some omniscient being, but it does put a severe crimp into any literal interpretation of how the world was created as presented in any of the major religious works.  As evidence keeps piling up for the basic veracity of the theory, it seems to me that the debate on whether to teach things like ‘Intelligent Design’ right alongside evolutionary theory should be ended - while such concepts may have a place in philosophy or literature classes, they do not deserve to be handed up in the same texts that cover biology. These ideas simply do not have the same evidentiary basis as evolution, and placing them on the same footing will do nothing but confuse the students about just what science is and how it is practiced.

Silicon Valley

Why does Silicon Valley dominate the world of electronics innovation? Not that there aren’t many things that are developed elsewhere, but for the last thirty years or so this place has been the leader in developing new products, manufacturing methods, and even whole new industry segments. Other places have sent people here to see just what the ‘formula’ is, and to a certain extent have managed to copy it, but they are still trailing this place in terms of patents granted or almost any other measure of success.

Now clearly part of the reason is the local great schools: Stanford and Berkeley are both world-renowned schools that year after year graduate brilliant and usually well-grounded students into the local businesses. And this doesn’t even count the network of various local community colleges and places like San Jose State. But having these students wouldn’t do any good if the local businesses couldn’t induce them to stay in the local area, not so easy when you consider that this area is one of the highest cost of living areas in the country, and is plagued with some of the worst commute traffic.

Business inducements range from relatively high starting salaries to the incredible number of start-up businesses that offer stock options and other perks, along with the opportunity to work on something new and different to new employees. Money alone isn’t all the answer, though. Another major piece is how employees are treated: here, most companies really believe in empowering their ‘little people’, giving them the authority to make meaningful decisions about the company direction, and treating them with some respect rather than as interchangeable cogs. Flexible working hours, corporate game and exercise rooms, memberships in athletic clubs, help with day-care and other family obligations are all part of the parcel.

There is a positive feedback effect working here, too. With so many high-talent people working here, an idea percolates from one group over to another, sparking additional ideas. Networking between people in multiple companies is common, happening anywhere from the corporate cubicle to the evening watering hole.  And of course, the very fact that things are happening here attracts more people who want to be in on the action.

Now it doesn’t hurt that the Bay Area has what some people would consider the world’s best climate: never too cold, you don’t get soggy-drenched in the winter, hurricanes and tornadoes are almost unheard of, and typically there are only a few days in the summer that it really gets hot.  And if you really want to go flop in the snow, there are some really great ski runs located only a few hours by car from here. There are some pretty good cultural/artistic places/theaters/museums here, too, allowing you to be a geek and art-lover at the same time.

I first moved to the Bay Area in 1972, when I was still in the Air Force, and got stationed at Mill Valley Air Force Station, located atop Mt. Tamalpais, about ten miles north of San Francisco. This, however, was not the place to experience the Silicon Valley revolution, as, with 169 curves from the top to the bottom of the mountain, plus another sixty miles to get to the heart of Silicon Valley,  it was a major chore to make the trip. However, when I left the military in 1980, I got an immediate job with a firm in Sunnyvale working on (as one small aspect of their overall business) microcomputers for use on the Galileo space shot.  This was my first real experience with the excitement and rewards of working in the valley (besides instantly doubling what I had been making in the military).  It was also my first experience with something known as environmental testing; clearly, if you expect a circuit to work in space, it makes sense to test it here on the ground at both very hot and very cold temperatures, in a vacuum, pure oxygen or nitrogen atmospheres, drop it a few times (the g-stress test), shake it up some more, and in general abuse it in every way you can think of. This is a field I’m still involved with today.

But since that first experience with the Silicon Valley way, other than one side trip to Florida to get married, I’ve remained in the valley, one among many others who find this environment a great place to work.

Don’t You Wish Everyone Was a Genius?

Our solar system orbits around the Milky Way once every 250 million years or so. It also has some proper motion versus the local star systems and dust clouds. Which means that over very long time scales, the Earth may experience some very different interstellar environments, from being inside/outside of a dust cloud to moving near a gamma ray burster (which is one of the listed possible causes for one of the great extinction events).

Poul Anderson, way back when (1954), capitalized on this set of facts to dream up something he called the Brain Wave. He hypothesized that humanity had evolved during a period when the Earth was in an area that slowed down electromagnetic waves. As human mental activity is mediated by such, it’s a short leap to dream of a time when the Earth would exit this area and return to where these waves would move at normal speed, with a concomitant increase in human mental activity, i.e, suddenly everyone would get very smart. And not just people, but animals also. While being smart might seem like a good thing to be, Anderson showed that this could produce some very deep problems.

When animals get smart enough to know what a slaughterhouse is, there would be an immediate crisis in keeping in the world fed. When those people who held menial jobs due to lack of good thinking abilities can suddenly see just what a waste of time their jobs are, and there is no one else who is willing to do those jobs, however necessary, what happens to civilization’s infrastructure? Intelligence alone does no good without information to process; education is necessary, and who will provide it? A brilliant idea does no good if there is no way to implement it - think about the problem a cave-man would have had if he figured out what lightning was and wanted to build an electric light bulb. Nor does it prevent continuing to come up with the wrong answers, because the basic assumptions the person is working from are false: belief in religions, UFO’s , conspiracy theories, and ‘I’m better than anyone else, I should be treated accordingly’ would continue to thrive. The whole scenario is a recipe for disaster.

Anderson had a pretty optimistic ending to his book, believing that people would manage to find solutions to the problem of too much brain power. I’m not so sure. There are just too many examples of very intelligent people doing very dumb things; people ‘think’ as much with their emotions as they do with their brains; and to date no one has come up with an ethos for living in harmony with everyone else that everyone buys into.

Sometimes being ’smart’ isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

What a Piece of Work is Man

Quick, now, when was the last time you thought about establishing ethical standards for the treatment of robots? Uh, never, right? But there is a group in South Korea (!) doing just this. Now perhaps the document they are attempting to create is a little ahead of its time - after all, so far there are no robots that would meet the normal definition of either intelligence or possessive of free will, at the moment they are still nothing more than machines. And it could be quite awhile before electronics and software advance to the point where something like Asimov’s Three Laws could even attempt to be implemented. So is what this group is doing a waste of time?

Not really. Somewhere along the line, humanity will be faced with other intelligences that are not ‘human’ - whether it be AI robots, aliens, genetically enhanced versions of other terrestrial  species, or even enhanced ’super humans’. At what point do we decide to treat these types of beings of being worthy of having the same rights, privileges, and obligations of everyday people? If you have a household robot, can you order it to do whatever you want, or must you consider whether such an action would be demeaning to the robot? Would you trust it to baby-sit your child? Would you need to give it the occasional day off? Does it require a salary? When should (must) you do what the robot asks you to do?

Some of these questions have been explored in various SF stories: Heinlein’s “Jerry Was a Man” and “Gulf“, Asimov’s Bicentennial Man, Simak’s City,  Connie Willis’ “Samaritan“,  and Orson Scott Card’s Lovelock, amongst many others. The general points presented in just about all of these stories are:

‘Free Will’ - if an entity has the ability to take actions on its own, free of outside direction, a certain level of respect and dignity should entail to that entity (this includes things like cats and dogs).

“Intelligence Level” - when the intelligence level reaches the point of a) self-awareness b) ability to understand both rights and obligations, then that entity should be treated as ‘human’.

But even within these generally agreed upon points, there are gradu