Author: Athenian

Tonight, take a few minutes, pull back from the computer, find a window or a balcony and gaze upwards. The mistress of the hunt, Artemis or Diana will be hosting a visit from her father, Zeus or Dias or Jupiter. Here they are about to set, though I know night has not yet fallen for most of you. I see another bright planet a hand’s breadth behind them and I believe it to be Saturn or Kronos (old man Time).

I envy those of you who will have clear sky and I am sorry for all of you who live under perpetual smog. A year and a half ago when a friend of mine and I stayed up all night we caught the pre-dawn show of the century. All five of the classical planets were visible, including elusive Mercury and rare Saturn.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, sprinkled like jewels on the warm indigo of the pre-dawn sky. I don’t think I’d ever seen Mercury before and Saturn only once or twice and never with another planet. Our brother and sister and father planets, all at once. The fact that I knew the surface gravity and temperature of each, as well as their atmospheric composition and system history detracted not at all from the awe that I felt that morning.

more…

My father was introduced to the idea of raw romance (as opposed to silly candlelit dinners) by his mother who had been a nurse during the Balkan Wars. She had taken my then young and small father to the main train station and pointed at two signs. The one said “Orient Express, points East: Salonica, Constantinople, Aleppo, Jerusalem. The other said simply “Twelve horses or fifty men”. “Both are romantic,” she said. A few years later he was the only volunteer in his call-up.

Tonight, please look at the sky and you can think big

or

at least see where so many Islamic flags come from.

John Tierney’s column in today’s NYT, Bombs Bursting on Air takes issue with the media’s obsession with suicide bombers.

There was no larger lesson except that some insurgents were willing and able to kill civilians, which was not news. We were dutifully presenting as accurate an image as we could of one atrocity, but we knew we were contributing to a distorted picture of life for Iraqis.

The standard advice to newly arrived journalists at that time was: “Relax. It’s not nearly as bad here as it looks on TV.”

Never mind that this was back in the summer of 2003, when it really was not that bad yet. Now, of course, Western journalists stay locked in their hotels afraid to set foot on the street for fear of abduction or worse.

I suspect the public would welcome a respite from gore, like the one that New Yorkers got when Rudolph Giuliani became mayor. He realized that even though crime was declining in the city, people’s fears were being stoked by the relentless tabloid and television coverage of the day’s most grisly crime. No matter how much the felony rate dropped, in a city of seven million there would always be at least one crime scene for a live shot at the top of the 11 o’clock news.

Mr. Giuliani told the police to stop giving out details of daily crime in time for reporters’ deadlines, a policy that prompted outrage from the press but not many complaints from the public. With the lessening of the daily media barrage, New Yorkers began to be less scared and more realistic about the risks on their streets.

I’m not advocating official censorship, but there’s no reason the news media can’t reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world’s dangers.

Just as New Yorkers came to be guided by crime statistics instead of the mayhem on the evening news, people might begin to believe the statistics showing that their odds of being killed by a terrorist are minuscule in Iraq or anywhere else.

According to the BBC: “More than 300 people are believed to have died in violence this month.” If we extrapolate this number from a country the size of Iraq to the United States it would be as if 3000 people had been blown up in May alone. The United States is engaged in a global war because some 3000 people were killed by suicide bombers.

If we extrapolate the number of people blown to pieces in Iraq by suicide bombers over the past 10 days to the United States for a full year, it would be the equivalent of more than 100,000 blasted bodies. Not quite so miniscule after all. If you add in the number of wounded survivors and the number of people affected in some way, the number quickly climbs into the millions.

It might be different if the statistics were going down and the situation actually improving, as it was in NYC in the ’90s. In Iraq this is not the case.

As Bob Herbert recently wrote we need to see more of what is actually going on in Iraq, not less.

Americans’ attitude toward war in general and this war in particular would change drastically if the censor’s veil were lifted and the public got a sustained, close look at the agonizing bloodshed and other horrors that continue unabated in Iraq. If that happened, support for any war that wasn’t an absolute necessity would plummet.

A teacher friend of mine told the unnerving story of another teacher who got into serious trouble because students had used a cell phone to video-record him in the classroom.

Ubiquitous surveillance cameras, cellphone cameras and videos signal the coming end of privacy. However, this cuts both ways. The Abu Ghraib story got out because of cameras and videos (Rumsfeld’s response was to ban the cameras!) Now, the New York Times is reporting that Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest.

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

“We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,” the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. “I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”

[snip]

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

They are watching us but we are also watching them. With cellphone cameras, digital video and still cameras, and the internet, we have more ways to look back at Big Brother. There are millions of Little Brothers out there. Some of them will do the monkey thing and spy on each other but some of them may save your bacon when the police grab you for no reason.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.

Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop’s lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.

[snip]

… Moreover, many of the tapes lack index and time markings, so cuts in the tape are not immediately apparent.

That was a problem in the case of Mr. Dunlop, who learned that his tape had been altered only after Ms. Clancy found another version of the same tape. Mr. Dunlop had been accused of pushing his bicycle into a line of police officers on the Lower East Side and of resisting arrest, but the deleted parts of the tape show him calmly approaching the police line, and later submitting to arrest without apparent incident.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Barbara Thompson, said the material had been cut by a technician in the prosecutor’s office. “It was our mistake,” she said…

Perhaps an innocent mistake? Perhaps not. If not, someone should pay, no? Ninety percent of the arrests have been dismissed but only after innocent people spent time in jail and were harassed and roughed up. It would be nice to get some real blowback against the police-state tactics employed during the Republican National Convention in New York last summer.

They spy on us.

We spy on them.

There are more of us.

As her body lay rotting in the grave, her perfect silicone breasts pointed at the stars forever. Except, maybe not.

In documents made public on Wednesday, health regulators estimated that up to 93 percent of silicone breast implants ruptured within 10 years.

Silicone breast implants have been banned for some thirteen years because they can rupture or leak. The manufacturers have been pressing for the ban to be lifted. The debate will come to a head next week.

The panel voted, 9 to 6, in October 2003 to approve silicone implants. In an unusual move, its chairman later wrote a letter to the F.D.A. urging that it reject the recommendation. The agency sided with the chairman and ruled that more information was needed about long-term safety.
[snip]
An expert committee of scientists found in 1999 that there was little evidence that silicone implants caused such diseases. Instead, the primary safety concern, the panel found, was the tendency of silicone implants to cause local complications like infections, pain and scarring.
All emphasis mine.

“Infections, pain and scarring”? That’s not enough to keep these things off the market?
How often do they fail?

Inamed studied its implants for four years and found that 9 percent a year rupture. Those numbers are fraught, however, because most patients have no idea when their implants rupture, and imaging tests are accurate in assessing failures only about two-thirds of the time.

Projecting the numbers over 10 years called for even more guesses. If one assumes that implants are no more likely to fail in their 10th year as they are in their first, just 21 percent of a cross-section of women will see their implants fail in 10 years.

But in comments posted on Wednesday on the agency’s Web site, reviewers wrote that implants, like cars and hearts, are more likely to fail as they age. Adjusting for the increasing risks that come with age, the agency estimated that 74 percent of a cross-section of women would suffer implant failures in 10 years. For women undergoing reconstructive surgery, mostly breast cancer survivors , the failure rate is 93 percent.

One percent over the lifetime of the implant would be too high a failure rate. “Just 21 percent”? What do they mean, just? One fifth will fail over a decade. That’s acceptable? Brain explodes, just as it did with this final quote:

Dr. Mark Jewell, president elect of the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, said he was surprised that the agency had estimated that silicone implants failed so often.

“That’s certainly news and does need to be addressed,” said Dr. Jewell, who has consulted for Inamed and Mentor. “But I feel that the devices should be approved.”

The companies can track the safety of the devices after they are approved, he said. Women often find that silicone implants feel more natural than saline, Dr. Jewell said.

“Silicone implants feel more natural“? I don’t know about you but I would rather look at and feel the breasts of a marble statue than a silicone-inflated pair.

I also have to question whether any medical device aimed at men would even be considered with such a failure rate.

The first sentence is a paraphrase from a poem. Anyone remember it?
Update [2005-4-7 18:15:8 by Athenian]: As I mention in comments below, I was reminded of the full quote:

But she will not surrender to these voracious guests
inviolate forever, her perfect plastic breasts.

Possibly by Eleanor Brown

The Capitalist System won, there is no doubt about it. The real Communists never had a chance and the dictatorships that ruled covered in its fig-leaf are mostly gone. That debate has been indefinitely postponed if not cancelled. The debate now is within the system to decide how unfettered it should be.

Markets can indeed create miracles. I do have a deep faith in fair and free markets, as do in free and fair elections. The thing about markets it that they work with monetary values.

Vital parts of the equation for a happy and healthy life have zero monetary value.

Imagine that you are a prospector in a sinleship on the gold-rush (well, helium-3-rush), in the Asteroid Belt. You will have to pay for everything you need to stay alive: air, water, radiation shelter, shelter (heat, pressure) etc. If you don’t buy that refill for you oxygen tank, you die. If you muck up the water recycling, you die. If you jettison radiation shielding to save on weight, you die in the next solar flare. If you can’t keep your ship’s insides within a few tens of degrees of normal because you didn’t replace the faulty thermostat, you freeze or fry.
Perhaps the cliche is old enough to have regained effect. The Earth is but a larger version of that spaceship. It provides services that appear to be free. There is no such thing as a free lunch.. The true costs of these services are becoming clear as these giant life-support systems begin to malfunction.

Even without the world-transforming change in viewpoints that would assign its proper valuation of many trillions of dollars to the planet’s ability to keep us alive and growing, we can begin the work of estimating.

Some things will be forever incapable of being priced, which is as it should be. On the other hand though, how much does the polluted air in LA and Athens and Mexico City, etc, cost in increased health care costs and unnecessary deaths? If one were to insure Bangladesh against submersion, what valuation would an insurance company give you? Ditto for Florida. What will be the cost of the cancers. etc, from the ozone hole? On a more pedestrian level, how much extra coal will we have to burn to keep our ACs in step with global warming? And how much will that contribute to global climate change?

If they want to force us to count beans, we shall. Even by their rules, we win.

And when we win, we come a step closer to changing the rules.

Unfortunately, the only other thing that will bring us closer to changing the rules will be even more widespread and bigger disasters.

The plight of the orange roughie (a particularly delicious fish which was apparently its great downfall) is another illustration of the tragedy of the commons. It is a slow maturing fish, typically needing something like a century before reaching sexual maturity, from the southern Pacific. Unfortunately for it, orange roughie became fashionable and has been hunted to commercial extinction and potentially even actual extinction. As stocks declined and the price went up, the fishermen became ever more determined to catch the fish.

What should the last orange roughie dinner cost?

According to this Associated Press story (via Yahoo):

Most Americans surveyed in a poll say they do not think any country, including the United States, should have nuclear weapons.

During the Cold War, I would have disagreed strongly with such a sentiment. Without the threat of mutually assured destruction it would have been much more likely that the United States and the Soviet Union would have fought World War Three with advanced conventional arms. Given that WWII killed some 100 million people, a hot war between the two superpowers would have been devastating, not to mention that there is no guarantee that the West would have won.

However, that is not what really caught my attention and what I want to ask all of you about.

Six in 10 people age 65 and older approve of the use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II; the same percentage of respondents 18 to 29 disapprove.

The argument for the use of Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, is that this was the fastest means of ending the war without the potentially catastrophic losses Americans would have incurred by actually invading the Japanese home islands.

Potentially hundreds of thousands of American military casualties averted by the actual deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.

Remember, atomic bombs were so new that the radiation and fallout effects were not really understood at the time. As much as a decade later the US was testing battlefield nuclear weapons with troops in the testing area.

The argument against strategic bombing, which, if viewed dispassionately, is overwhelming, had been lost long before, in the Blitz against London and the firebombings of Dresden and Coventry. The enemy was so evil and such a threat that perhaps this was justifiable.

In any case, I was wondering how Boomers feel about the first and so far only use of nuclear weapons in anger, some sixty years later.  

About eight millions years ago, the scientific consensus goes, the lines that eventually led to humans and to the rest of the great apes diverged. This is probably clear only in retrospect. If an alien species stood surveying the Earth at the time, and for a few million years thereafter, our line would not have stood out as the one slated for more brains than we know what to do with.

We do know that average hominid brain size doubled within the last two million years whereas the average chimpanzee’s brain size remained unchanged. Human ancestors with skull-sizes in the modern range have been around for about a million years, give or take a few hundred thousand, and skulls as large as anything floating around today have been around for some 150,000 years, at least.

(Arthur Koestler theorized that the extremely rapid growth of the hominid brain contributed to humanity’s flaws in his grand summation, Janus. I urge everyone to read him though he may seem outdated.)
A rather more dubious scientific consensus holds that just 50kya (thousands of years ago) there was a great naissance in which culture, language and symbolic thought first erupted. Before this we were intelligent beasts. Afterwards we were primitive humans.

New archaeological finds, such as musical instruments, ochre pigment and art predating the 50kya cut-off are beginning to disturb this consensus. Common sense also dictates against it. What the —- were our ancestors doing and thinking during this 70ky, at the least, period? What were they doing and thinking during the millions of years before? Did symbolic thought take them over like a mind-virus? (This I actually find almost plausible. Memes and all that.)

We now know that chimpanzees murder, wage war and have inherited cultures. They do these things with the brain case our ancestors had more than two million years ago. Just this past summer a dog was reported to be able to bring a new toy from a stack by figuring out which ones already had names.

Dogs are also better than chimps, truly wild dogs (feral for thousands of years) and wolves at guessing human intentions. Gorillas and chimps can develop vocabularies of hundreds of words (remember, a working human vocabulary may contain as few as 800 words). Coco the Gorilla had an IQ score in the 80s and that was even though they deducted points for such obvious species specific things as preferring to be in the woods rather than a house when the thunderstorm hit.

Dolphins and birds (birds?!) have demonstrated their own versions of intelligence and culture. Many animals have proven to be capable of deception and subterfuge. Even more remarkable, some animals have shown that they are capable of empathy. Blue jays will look behind a curtain for something hidden, something that does not occur to human infants until they are a few years old.  

What I am getting at is that intelligence and culture have been around for hundreds of millions of years and that our culture and intelligence is an outgrowth of this older stuff. I do not believe that it is possible to truly understand humanity unless one understands the antiquity of its origins. If you don’t accept evolution, you can not really understand human nature.

This was a riff. If you want me to fill it out with links and documented facts and stuff, I will do so with pleasure, so long as there is interest. As far as I know, all the material above is factually correct. Please advise me if not.

One vote is a mandate, three million is a landslide.
Tax cuts for the rich which do little for growth but damage the economy long-term are good.
Janet Jackson’s nipple is bad. No, it is the most horrifying vision ever inflicted upon the American public.
Abu Ghraib was fraternity-style hazing perpetrated by a handful of bad apples.
Gay marriage is the most important issue of the decade.
The humiliation of the United States across the globe is of no consequence.
The United States is proud to be the only nation in the civilized world without universal health care.
Slashing the hot sands of Iraq is a great way to hone the rapier that is the US military.
God made Adam out of clay and Eve out of Adam’s rib and no goddamned textbook is going to tell my kid different.
Billions of dollars for a system that will never work to defend against missiles is a good investment. Billions of dollars to check more containers is not.
Pot sends you to prison. Oxycontin keeps you on the air.
Stomping all over the last completely untouched part of the United States, the Artic National Wildlife Reserve, to extract less than one year’s oil consumption rather than improving efficiency, is a no-brainer.
Texan lawmakers putting up a fight for democracy are ridiculous and in no way something the National Democratic Party should defend, and the use of State troopers and Federal assets in their pursuit is entirely appropriate.
Lying about adultery in the Oval Office will get you impeached. Lying about the great issues of the day will get you (re-)elected.
Obviously the best way to protect our forests and the air we breathe is to let the companies involved regulate themselves.
The United States is proud to stand with other upstanding conservative nations like Iran, Libya and Sudan against reproductive and sexual rights.
It is entirely reasonable for companies that make voting machines to keep their software secret while promising to deliver Ohio to the ruling party. They are also entirely within their rights to fight against adding what every single ATM around the world has: a printer.
When Russia reduced Grozny to rubble that was entirely different from the US reducing Falluja to rubble.
Getting your family and their friends to keep you out of Vietnam and every mess you ever made is clever and courageous. Actually fighting there is stupid and spineless.
Your right to go to a mall while packing is sacrosanct. Your right to free speech at the same mall is trespassing on private property.
A tiny clump of cells has more rights than a fully grown adult.
Senate traditions that protect the minority party and are centuries old have no place in the 21st century.
Claiming you are `born again’ and not going to church gets you more cred than being a lifelong Catholic who does go to church.
Vilifying, scapegoating and destroying the people who point out the truth is a much better way of defending yourself than disputing the facts.
Helping your friends and campaign contributors by awarding them no-bid contracts worth billions is the Christian thing to do and nobody will hold you accountable when additional billions go missing and vital work does not get done.
Nothing succeeds like monumental failure.

This is getting long and I am nowhere near finished. The United States has been a bit un-sane for quite a while now, true, but the last four years are down-the-rabbit-hole surreal and most people seem not to have noticed. Even if our prized exit-polls were absolutely right, that still means that 48% of the voters think that this administration has been `politics as usual’ which is like saying Genghis Khan was `warfare as usual’.

Remember, Genghis took no prisoners. They will not offer quarter. We should not either. It is time to get serious. Raise the stakes, think outside the box, start getting people out of this insidious reality tunnel and prepare for civil disobedience. Things are not normal and we are fast approaching the point of no return (if it is not behind us).

Many of us seem to have pets and/or be animal lovers, so I figured some pet blogging is in order.

Join me below the fold, we don’t want to clutter up the diary page with pictures.
This is Zinnia.

She is nearly five years old. In the summer of 2000 she wandered into the house I was staying at on the island of Corfu, sick, hungry and covered in ticks and fleas. We cleaned her up and just a few days later looked like this:

She’s a heartbreaker alright.

I had said I should introduce her, so there she is.

You are blessed. You live in the most promising time ever. You even have a chance at immortality.

You are cursed. You live in the most dangerous time ever. Your species may even become extinct.

Sometime in the late fifties, early sixties, the human race acquired the capacity to commit suicide. Sputnik showed the way out. As long as we are confined to the surface of a single planet, we are supremely vulnerable.

I call it the bottleneck: the period of time between the acquisition of the ability to destroy life on Earth and the point where the species no longer depends on any single planet. The longer all our eggs are in a single basket, vulnerable to nuclear exchanges, climate change, natural and artificial pandemics, the environmental precipice, etc., the lower our chances are to survive as a species.

I think we are only going to get one chance at this.
Let me repeat. The bottleneck, the riskiest time in human history, began with the Trinity test at Alamogordo and will end on the day an off-planet outpost can sustain itself and grow on its own. My estimate is that this will take about a hundred years, except for…

… the singularity.

This is the notion that technological change and especially cybernetic progress plots a “j” shaped graph that resembles the gravity gradient near a black hole. As you fall towards a black hole you keep going faster and faster until you are dividing by zero. What happens next is literally unknowable and virtually unimaginable.

On present trends, an average desktop PC in 2020 will have the complexity of  a human brain. By 2030 it will have the complexity of all human brains. By 2050…

Nanotech. Biotech. IT, the internet and the grid. Automation and von Neuman machines. Nuclear fusion. The future is so bright because it is an accretion  disk surrounding a black hole. Gotta wear the armored shades. In a stable society these would be severe challenges. In ours…

Unfortunately for the human race, the bottleneck and the singularity coincide. Perhaps it is always thus. Perhaps no race survives this stage and that is the answer to “where is everybody?”

You live in the most interesting of times. (What did you do to those Chinese people, anyway?) The fundies may even be right: These might be the “end days” but not for the reasons they think.

I have tried to distill these thoughts. Is the brew too strong?

Update [2005-3-25 17:58:1 by Athenian]:

Some additional points:

In the early sixties the nuclear throw-weight of the two superpowers was at its highest as both relied on huge bombs to balance out their inaccurate missiles. If the Cuban missile crisis had resulted in nuclear war thousands of 50 megaton bombs would have devastated the world. Such a war in the 80s would have been much less destructive.

Progress?

Challenged by the Soviet sputnik the United States panicked and rushed its way into space to the lasting detriment of a serious effort. Imagine if the Apollo billions had been sunk into the X-15 (space plane) effort. The footprints on the moon would have come later but we would be making them even now. A blaze of glory was followed by the giant mess they made of the shuttle program.

The shuttle program started off with fatal flaws caused by penny pinching which were later compounded by a lack of imagination. The fuel tanks don’t have to be ditched. They could tag along to orbit where their residual oxygen and hydrogen and pressurized space would be a god-send to any orbiting outpost.

We are woefully behind where we should be in space. However, there is a remedy. It is the space elevator, which could be constructed in about two decades at the price of the Apollo program (or Shrub’s silly Mars program).

Any species confined to a single world is vulnerable to extinction from various threats including solar flares, asteroids, orbital instability, nearby super novae, climate change, ecological collapse etc. What is unique since 1945 is our ability to destroy our world.

The environmental precipice is the idea that as climate change, pollution and population pressures mount a point of no return is reached, beyond which the ability of society to respond begins to decline rapidly. As growth slows and instability grows our ability to fix the mess diminishes and the disasters multiply.

We have already used up the Earth’s supplies of readily available fossil fuels and minerals, so any society trying to reemerge from barbarism following a collapse of civilization may well face insurmountable obstacles trying to reestablish a technological civilization.

The consequences of true artificial intelligence, potentially far surpassing our own, boggle the mind on their own. When coupled with tiny intercommunicating devices, designer organisms and DNA as well as self-replicating machines and inexhaustible power and labor (robots, etc), it paints a future in just a few decades that is more different from our present than we are from the distant caveman past.

According to the Drake equation (number of stars times the fraction that have planets times the fraction that can sustain life times the fraction where life actually evolves times the fraction that evolves intelligence times the fraction that communicates times the fraction of time that civilization exists), with conservative assumptions, there should be hundreds if not thousands of civilizations chattering all around us. Instead, we get silence. But if you drop the time that a civilization lasts to a century, you get 10. It is easy to lose ten civilizations in a galaxy. If no one can get through the bottleneck the galaxy will be a lonely place.

Von Neuman space probes able to replicate themselves once they reached a target stellar system would be able to blanket the galaxy in a mere million years. So it is a good bet that nobody in the galaxy has actually released such machines, at least within the last million years. When you consider that the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old, a million years does not seem like a very long time.