Crowdsourcing Legislative Sanity

I've been frustrated lately about how Congress does legislation. Bills are enormous, too big to read prior to our elected officials voting on it. The average citizen has no chance of comprehending what's going on prior to a vote being taken. Too many unrelated amendments are added in, usually because individual members pledge their vote for some pork or pet project, or alternately because someone is playing poison pill politics.

I have often wondered what I would do if I was a Congressman, Senator, or the President, and needed to read all the material you have to make decisions about. It's too much reading for anyone but a speed reader to get through. I figured the way to do it would be for the staff to divide up the work and read the report/bill/law/etc. in sections and do short summaries of each part so that you could get a rapid summary. Then you could browse specific parts in detail if there were the parts you were concerned about.

I've often wondered the same thing about Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. He has lots of guests that he interviews that are out pitching their most recent book and it always seems like he has actually read the book. How does he have the time to read the entire book each time? I have suspected that his reading was outsourced to his staff for some time, and that he got some kind of cliff notes summary version to read. Even if they tagged just a few portions, the best parts of the book, you could get through a book in an hour or so if you only had to read a concise summary and maybe a dozen of the best passages.

There is another concept toward outsourcing and consolidating your work that is done by a website called Galaxy Zoo. This is called crowdsourcing. They take the evaluation of galaxy pictures from Hubble and let subscribers sort through the data with a tutorial and applet to help frame their answers. It takes a group of data that is too big for an individual or small group to process and makes it manageable. While the bulk of the data is still not examined by an expert, it can be accessed quickly and indexed for particular trends or phenomenon. This allows they to sort through some 200 billion photos of galaxies in a couple of years, where this would have taken hundreds of years for all the astrophysicists in the world to examine them.

Why not take legislative review out of the hands of staffers and aids, who are political appointees that probably also have political agendas? Why not crowdsource all pending legislation? Have people read sections and summarize them with an outline or app that standardizes the responses. What does it say? What is it about? What are the problems with it? How do you personally feel about it? This last would be in order to give weighted responses. This would be superior to a posting of the entire bill that had a long stream of random comments by anyone that wants at the bottom. You've all seen these comment threads, they are worthless for helping you understand the content of whatever they comment on. Some of these comments in typical threads are well reasoned and useful, but most of it is emotional or inconsequential.

You have to make a commenting community put their efforts into something more useful and accessible. Summaries could be weighted by reviews from others, or there could be a wiki-like function of editors that could block users that are just trying to obscure the subject, use it as a spam outlet, or derail the conversation because they are politicians or lobbyists themselves.

Ideally, a system like this would enable the public to look at pending legislation and quickly find the objectionable or flawed aspects of it, and put public pressure on their representatives to either amend the legislation or rewrite it completely. Ideally, this system would give power to the public to override lobbyists and special interests.

Unfortunately, it could be subverted really simply if our legislators decided to keep pending legislation secret. This in itself would be something that I would hope the public would protest, if they were aware of it. We've seen committee work taken into secrecy in the past, so you know there is a tendency to hammer out backroom deals outside of the light of public scrutiny.

The legislative review site I'm envisioning could be established as an independent oversight entity controlled by the electorate. It would encourage legislative literacy and participation, particularly if complex legal bullshit currently being put into bills could be made simple, quick, and understandable. I believe it could also bring people together in the center, where most real people reside, not in the extremes that the major parties often use as talking points to rally support and obscure the real issues and real way they run the government. It is possible that we would not need a new or third party if we could take back control of the two major parties. It is possible that many of these legislators would welcome a way to say no to the special interests and actually do what is right for the country. This pressure could be brought to bear if only we had a way of wading through all the verbiage and sorting out what is actually being proposed.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend

I was listening to someone recently saying that he was a strict Constitutionalist. I've heard this phrase spoken in many recent debates and campaign speeches. The implication is that one side is right because they are following the true intent of the constitution, and that everyone should know that anyone that opposes this viewpoint are flagrantly flaunting all constitutional dictates and just making up new rules as they see fit. This is similar to what people say about activist judges. You only gripe when a judge makes a ruling against what they believe.

What I find interesting about the Constitution is that when the President is sworn into office, or if you take a commission as an officer in the military, you are sworn to defend the Constitution. Not your country, not your family, not the leaders, but a piece of paper, an idea. I still find this a little strange. You can simplify it and say that the Constitution defines your country and that's what you are defending. I think maybe the framers of the Constitution meant people to be loyal to the rules, and the rule of law calls for the free election of new leaders. This prevents us from making leaders permanent fixtures.

I was looking at the World Almanac later, thinking about the Constitution and I opened it up and found the text on page 579 of the 2006 edition. I realized that I have never read the whole Constitution. I assume that most strict Constitutionalists have not either. It reminds me of people that say they believe in everything in the Bible, but when asked, they admit they have never actually read the whole Bible. So I read the Constitution.

To be fair, I had already read the Amendments many times, as the exact wording of the Bill of Rights comes up often and is worth re-reading. The original Constitution is the document that was written in 1787 and outlined how we would become the United States we are today. It took the U.S. from the Articles of Confederation, which was the way that the government was set up after declaring independence, to a government with a central, federal core that the states would form around.

People often question how the Constitution could possibly be correct for all times when it was written over 200 years ago and the world has changed considerably since then. One point that strict Constitutionalists will make pertaining to this is that you can always amend the Constitution. This is true, the method for amending the Constitution is written right in it. Article V states that either 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or 2/3 of the States Convening to form amendments must pass, then 3/4 of the states must ratify the amendment for it to become law.

I had a discussion with a gun enthusiast and told him that I had discovered that the term "Militia" was not just in the 2nd Amendment, but was all throughout the main body of the Constitution. There is no exact definition of Militia in the Constitution, and there may not be a modern equivalent. I'm not sure that a Founding Father, if rushed forward in time and asked to comment on what a Militia is, would even be able to find for us a comparable group that exists today. In the time of the Revolution, people at a state and local level may have to defend themselves from Indian attack, or possibly from an external invasion (foreign power) to their homes. Everyone was armed to hunt, and I suppose there were occasional wild animals that would enter areas inhabited by people, forcing them to band together in self-defense. The Militia was just a bunch of average guys that picked up their ever present firearms and came together as a group. We don't allow this. We have Police, but you have to have training and pass a test and get hired to do that. We have National Guard and State Reserve forces, but these are people that were trained by the Federal Government and while they can be called out by state Governors, they more typically belong to the Commander-in-Chief (especially since 9/11, after which the Bush administration called on these reserves to fight to a degree that they were not even called on in the Viet Nam War). So, if aliens from space landed tomorrow and began a War of the Worlds - style invasion, do you really think that anyone that you handed a gun to would not willingly step up and fight? Excluding the cowards that would lose their composure and simply run for the hills, the average pacifist that is against firearms in theory will gladly kill to defend his family. The problem is that we do not ever face this situation (and we do not need to hunt for food), so the ownership of firearms as the Founding Fathers envisioned it is not applicable to today's world.

The gun enthusiast pointed out that the proposal of a Constitutional Amendment on gun rights would fail if written either way, pro- or anti- gun ownership. I think he's right. There is no clear overwhelming majority either way. Given the margin of divide on most political issues right and left, there are not many ways the Constitution could be amended with the current mood of the populous. So gun ownership falls into an ambiguous middle ground. People seeking to make what they feel are reasonable restrictions to gun ownership are not usually thwarted by Constitutional arguments and those wishing to extend gun ownership rights, such as the recent trend to allow concealed carry laws in many states, are also not restricted by the Constitution.

There were other things in the Constitution that surprised me. Just how much of the original Constitution has been superseded is surprising. One real surprise for me what the language for return of the slaves to slave states or rather to their owners if they escaped their masters and ran away to another state. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there were no free states. By the time the Constitution was being framed, states in the North were only just started to outlaw slavery. I remember learning in my pre-Civil War history how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law inflamed Abolitionists in the North. What you don't realize when you read the Constitution in detail is that this provision was already written into the Constitution almost 60 years before the Fugitive Slave Laws were enacted. You see in the Constitution the struggle to bind together the free and separate institutions that were the states into a single federal group, with central governing authorities. As the United States under the Articles of Confederation (and later, the seceded Southern States under their Confederation) proved, if you do not have strong central authority, you will not have the power to act as a group, and you will not have the power to survive.

Their were a number of things that were amended since the original Constitution. There is a very strange clause in there about the way Presidents are to be elected. The expectation was that there would be multiple candidates running for President, and there was a provision for what I will call a run-off election, but in reality, it's a matter of narrowing down the top two candidates. It used to be that you picked who you liked out of a large field, then the top two would not have clear majorities and they would redo the vote with just the top two. In the event of a tie or dispute, the House would decide. This happened between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was one vote away from not being our third President.

There were other odd things. It sounds like there was an expectation that states may want to combine or further subdivide into more or less states. The ability to raise taxes is throughout the text. The problem I have is that I do not understand a portion of the text. What is a Letter of Marque and Reprisal? There are lots of phrases that seem to be preventing states from being able to screw over one another competitively. There is also language that what one state grants its citizens is supposed to be recognized by other states. So what about gay marriage? How is that not a national right as soon as one state extends it as a right for themselves?

One very interesting phrase at the end of the body of the Constitution, before the last Article that tells how the Constitution will be ratified, is that there will be no religious test for qualification for any office in the United States. This certainly flies in the face of people today that like to say that we are a Christian Nation and that our Founding Fathers intended for us to be Christian. If that is so, why are they explicitly saying that there be not test for religion to hold office? If we are a Christian Nation, that clause should say that only Christians can hold office. We are not a Christian Nation, only a nation that is predominantly Christian.

The Bill of Rights comes along and immediately limits the power of the new Government that was established. Everyone knows that the Bill of Rights consists of 10 Amendments. What I did not realize until I re-read this was that there were originally 12 proposed. The first original Amendment was about the apportionment of Representatives which was never passed, and the second was about compensation to members of Congress, which was only passed in 1992.

I only recognized four names on the list of the people that signed the Constitution. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. I was surprised John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were not involved, but I found out that they were in Europe serving as ambassadors at the time. I recognize many more names of people that signed the Declaration of Independence. I would venture to say that most people probably consider the signers of the Declaration of Independence as our Founding Fathers, even though that document only says what we are not, not what we are. The true Founding Fathers that set up the United States and made us what we are today are the writers of the Constitution.

So, after reading the Constitution, I would have to say that I believe we should follow it as we do all laws and regulations, but we also have to revisit it and recraft it from time to time. The original Constitution makes it pretty clear that slavery was not only accepted, but protected by the laws of the land. We had to fight a bloody Civil War to change that. My point is that laws are made by men, and men make mistakes. Times change, and the way we govern ourselves has to change with them. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots from time to time. It's simpler just to amend the Constitution to reflect changing realities. I prefer pruning the branches of the Constitution to descending into chaos.

Culture of Cults

When I was in college, we had a religious group on campus that was recruiting a lot of students and growing very fast. Then the college newspaper, the Collegian, reported that they were a cult. Supposedly, they would take depressed and despondent students on a "retreat" where they would put them in a room with a dozen members and pressure them until they cracked. They wouldn't let them go until they started to agree with them that their views were correct. They would isolate the members from their friends and families over the next few weeks and continue to work on them until they were indoctrinated. I remember the paper reporting that one student's father lost contact with her and became alarmed. He hired someone to kidnap her back and had her deprogrammed. She explained how she had been brainwashed and how glad she was to escape.

We've recently met a couple that are in a local charismatic church that is growing very fast. They have attempted to recruit us several times. We've learned that innocent invitations to parties and get-togethers always include extended sessions of prayers and preaching. I became suspicious of the church and did some research. There were glowing reviews of the church online, as well as scathing commentaries. The detractors were usually members of similar churches that had only small variants to the doctrine. I saw some indications that the church was a cult. I found their site and saw that they had a podcast. When I downloaded and listened to the most recent episode, it was a real treat. They believe that the end of the world is coming. More specifically, they believe that the end times may have already started, and the 1000 years of bad times are here. The sermon discussed how they needed to put laws in place to protect the faithful and needed to take over government functions so that they could be in control. They discussed how the end times would have pockets of good interspersed in areas that had gone bad. They spent a considerable time talking about how this other church was full of nutty people that were seriously deluded because they believed that Christ comes at the end of the 1000 years, while the truth is that Christ comes at the beginning of the 1000 years. Since listening to this incredible sermon, the couple has shared with us their ideas on storing a year's worth of food in their house, and raising chickens as a way to insure they don't go hungry if society collapses.

This is nuts in my opinion. I believe you're free to believe what you want to believe, but I also believe that I can believe that what you believe is crazy, and in this case, that's what I believe. More importantly, when people believe something that is insane, and their ideology is telling them to go out and recruit and spread the word and be ready to take over the government to further these beliefs, that's the point where you've crossed the line into dangerous.

What am I going to do about this? Avoid the crazy people and warn others if the subject comes up.

I started thinking about cults and the characteristics of what makes a cult. Just like the old revelation that sexuality was fluid and that people were not gay or straight, but usually somewhere on the continuum between the extremes, cultish behavior or beliefs are on a continuum. There are many organizations that exhibit cult-like behavior.

So I put together a list of characteristics of cults.
1. Beliefs that cannot be shaken by truth or facts.
2. Recruiting of other members.
3. Intolerance of dissent within the cult group.
4. Policing of beliefs within the group. Training to learn and reinforce group cohesion.
5. Attacking individuals or groups outside of the cult that disagree.
6. Devotion to the cause and willingness to do and say what you are told by the group despite the costs and downside of these actions.
7. Certainty that other forces are arrayed against you. Paranoia. Us versus them mentality that precludes critical thinking or ability to consider circumstances dispassionately.
8. Willingness to protect the group despite the cost or the righteousness of any particular circumstances.

I started thinking about groups that displayed cultish behavior came up with the following list:

Religious Cults
Political Parties
Military Organizations
Police Forces
Intelligence Organizations?
Sports Teams or Fans around Sports Teams
Corporations
Political Movements
Media Organizations

Now obviously, not all members of these groups display cult-like behavior, but there are great examples within each group.

The military, of which I was once a member, is very conscious of their "socialization". They require cohesion to function and succeed, they expect orders to be followed explicitly (and rapidly without question) and they evoke strong loyalty reactions. They don't get pegged to the far end of the cult meter because there are examples of military people that will speak out about a war or report their fellow members for infractions.

Police organizations that become corrupt or overly brutal become cult-like. They talk about the Blue Code of Honor and the Blue Shield of Silence (that's not right, but I can't remember what they call the effect where police are not supposed to ever report each other or bring each other up on charges).

Military organizations that form around brutal dictators are cult-like. Look at North Korea as a prime example. Dissent it not tolerated and belief of anything other than that the Supreme Leader is a godlike figure is not tolerated. Hitler had a cult of personality built up around him and it infected the entire nation to a degree.

Political Parties can be cult-like when they issue "talking points" and try to keep everyone "on message". The problem with this is that if they pick a bad direction, there is no way to correct the problem and steer onto the right course.

The advantage of behavior in the direction of a cult is that people can be unified, they can speak and act with one purpose and they can get things done. They can sweep aside opposition and will not be slowed by internal dissent or hesitancy. The disadvantage is that groups can either be driven far down a bad path, or societies will not find innovations and new ideas if they do not fit in nicely with old beliefs. I can imagine the anti-cult groups having slogans like "Think for yourself" and "Question Authority".

In real practice, I believe that society swings back and forth between this cult discipline (like was seen in the McCarthy era) and dissent and questioning (like what we saw in the 60's). I believe it's good to vacillate back and forth between these extremes. That way you get the advantage of decisive action and the advantage of self correction. History has fluctuated back and forth between these extremes, but what you have to ask yourself is, where am I right now?

Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

The recent rise of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street has caused some mixed feelings. While the movement is disorganized, diffuse, and does not have a central message, it has evoked a strong reaction in the public. People that trend to the left are sympathetic to their opposition to big corporations or ultra-rich. The unemployed, the underemployed, and those who work hard, but see their salaries and benefits slipping every year feel justified in being angry at the 1% of the population that has the bulk of the wealth in this country. The conservative right are scornful on one hand, calling the protesters ignorant or misguided, and fearful on the other hand, saying they feel that these protests will spiral out of control.

Police in riot gear have already broken up protests in Denver, and police in New York City are increasingly trying to control or break up the protests there. Some compare this to the reception the Tea Party movement of two years ago got with the public. Primarily against big government, they were successfully co-opted by Fox News sponsorship and Republican Party courtship. What started out as a revolutionary movement has basically become the far-right wing of the Republican Party, with a seat at the table in Government and a National Organization.

What people fail to understand as they look at these two movements with very different complaints and issues is that the core impulse that spawned the movements are basically the same thing.

Both movements' primary complaint is against the size, power, and corruption of their chosen nemesis. It's Big Government versus Big Corporations. The problem is not how big these institutions are, the problem how some of these institutions have gone rogue. They are unmanaged, selfish, and malevolent to society's health and long term goals. They are short sided and corrupt, seeking to get on top, amass ever greater power and money, then rig the game so that they will always be at an overwhelming advantage.

The actual problem that this country, and to a similar extent, the world is embroiled in, this fear of big governments and big corporations, is not two separate problems. This unacceptable mess large institutions have created is two sides of the same coin. They are inextricably joined at the hip. Big corporations fund and corrupt big government, and big government then provides them legal cover for the nefarious activities of corporations. Who lobbies Washington and funds political campaigns? Special interests intent either in getting a business advantage or in having government either subsidize them or leave them alone with rules and regulations. Who gets elected? Not principled popular people that go to Washington with ideals that cannot be swayed, but fickle politicians that court the biggest supporters, then do nothing to interfere and everything to help the special interests that fund their elections. Once they have tilted the playing field to their corporate partners' advantage, they often leave government and go straight to work for the companies they already served while in office.

The real problem with this setup is not with the size of the institutions or the amount of money, the problem is a lack of control and accountability. The problem is that no moral and ethical institution is powerful enough to challenge and correct these imbalances. The system is rigged against those without wealth, power, or influence. Frankly, those without wealth, power, or influence are disorganized and could not be effective in making any changes to those with power. The supreme court has ruled that corporations have the same rights as people and campaign donations equals free speech. This has given a green light to the people at the top that are exploiting the system to the hilt. It gives society the feeling that things are spiralling out of control and that there is no way to correct this and rein it all back in.

The other underlying problem is that these big entities are doing what is good for themselves, and not what is good for society. They are often doing what is good for themselves at the expense of society. If these massive institutions were looking out for the common good, no one would begrudge them any of their wealth or power. Indeed, there are many organizations that have reached their pinnacle of development and are doing a great deal of good in the world. There are also organizations that have lost their way and come back to their senses. But the incentives in the business world and in politics are all aimed to push the system further in the direction we have been going. The inclination by any power player is to use any dirty trick in the book or their competition will roll right over them.

These giant institutions seem to be short sighted and unaware of the effect that they are having on society. Dan Carlin, in his Common Sense podcast, made the comparison of recent protests all across the Western World to the protests in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring. It is surprising how little is known (or I should say how little is reported and emphasized in the media) about these movements that are cropping up everywhere. Most people probably could not answer a Jeopardy game style questioning of why there were recent protests in the following countries: Greece, Spain, England, Italy, Israel, or India. If you can find information about these protests online, it will surprise you that something this big is not already in the news every night.

My fear, when I think about this rising unease and this escalating willingness to take to the streets to protest is that the problems being pointed out in these protests are real and they are not being addressed. The lack of government and corporate responsibility is going to push people towards socialism and away from capitalism. The masses need to be heeded if for no other reason than to let the powerful stay in power. If the large institutions that are in power today would only be responsible and share power and wealth with the people, and if they would concentrate on doing what is best for the entire society in the long run, there would be a chance that the people will not rise up against the powerful. If they crack down on protesters and double down on their policies, they could very well push the people to take more drastic action and disrupt society. While it feels good to get out in the street and shake your fist when you are mad about an injustice, it is not good to tear down these large institutions. In the end, stable, peaceful, non-violent society comes from big strong governments and jobs, wealth, prosperity, and technological advances and innovations come from big strong corporations, and these are what makes life a continuous series of improvements. These benefits must be channelled wide throughout society and shared in order to be preserved.

Super Organism

I just saw another example of life on the planet acting like life in a body.

Bodies have a genetic code they follow that is influenced by signals. Hunger makes a trigger go off that makes you want to eat. Injuries send signals that direct the body where to respond with an immune response or where to perform repairs.

I was listening to a podcast about microorganisms that cause a behavioral change in their hosts. There were several examples, starting with mice that get a parasite that causes them to stop fearing, and in fact start to love the smell of cats. Their behavior gets them eaten, so the parasite can propagate in the cat. There is a catapillar that gets a virus that prevents him from molting. They climb to the top of the tree and eat until they die. Then they explode open and rain virus particles down on the other caterpillars in the tree. They were also talking about viruses that pass on traits from one host to another, possibly speeding up evolutionary adaptations in a population.

There is a lot of talk lately about the function of the bacterial population that we carry around with us. Besides the beneficial work that some strains do for us, aiding in digestion and preventing harmful strains from infecting us, there is a great deal of interest in the possible ways that these cultures of bacteria are affecting our behavior. Evolution dictates that strains that change behavior in a way that threatens their hosts will soon die out, so it stands to reason that we will find many beneficial relationships between our internal bacterial passengers and ourselves.

This reminds me so much of how a well functioning cell behaves. Stimulus, response, but not necessarily the same response, given the atmosphere the stimulus is given in.

Many people have speculated on a phenomenon called Gaia, or the Earth as a superorganism. The sum total of all of the species, working together, each effecting the others. Many people have a hard time believing this could be true when you look at the imbalances, such as human population running away, or species being hunted to extinction. The people that theorize about Gaia always seem to come up with this Disney-like interpretation with all the animals in the forest talking to each other and living in harmony. What if it's not that simple or pure? What if brutality and consumption are part of the plan, and we do work together on a higher level? Would we even know what that looks like? Would we even know how to prove it, much less see it? I'm not saying this potential superorganism is in perfect harmony, or has some kind of purpose or way of exerting self-determination. I'm just saying that there are influences and relationships that are not at all obvious. We should be open to the things we see in the future that may prove that there are more connections than we ever suspected.

Weeds

There was a podcast on Science Friday that originally aired on July 15th of 2011. It was about Weeds and Invasive Species. I listened to it again around the end of December 2011 and put an outline here on my blog, and now am sitting down to complete the entry in May of 2012.

The subject was weeds. This is usually a plant, and sometimes an invasive species. Simply put, it is a species that is in a place you don't want it. By this definition, you might include some animals, although you wouldn't call them weeds. Many people would treat them the same, though. If it's something you don't want, many people try to eradicate them.

The discussion between the two guests, one a Professor of Biology, and the other an author, was interesting and struck a chord with me. I've often been a fan of plants that other people are always trying to kill (animals, too, for that matter). I've had a hard time whenever I tried to explain the virtues of a species to someone who had a deep hatred for whatever it was. I often wondered where they got their idea and how you could ever change their minds.

At the core of my belief is the thought that biodiversity is important. Not just the liberal activist, knee jerk recitation of "biodiversity" as a way of sounding hip and trendy without really thinking about it. I've always thought that life on Earth forms a web, a rich tapestry made of many ingredients. When you start knocking out certain strands of the web or certain patterns or colors of the tapestry, you run the risk of making the structure fall apart and causing it to stop functioning. You never know what other species might be depending on that particular plant or animal, so it's best not to make an arbitrary decision that it's "undesirable" and try to wipe it out. If you find out later that you needed it, it could be too late. Nature evolved in equilibrium with each species as part of the mix, it's insane to think that removing some of them at random won't have an effect on the rest.

Another thing I've always suspected is that there will be value in most species, if studied close enough. This is beyond the way that this species impacts others, or the exact role it plays in nature. I believe that most species have one or two molecular tricks that their DNA perform that we can learn from. It seems that each time we really study a life form in detail, we find something biochemically about it that is unique. We will need all these tricks if we are to survive in a resource starved and overpopulated world. The obvious example of this is the search for medicines and other pharmaceuticals in plants, but what if the thing you find is an adhesive or a natural plastic? It's still valuable.

One of the interesting points the podcast guests made was that many species tend to rapidly colonize and thrive in environments where we have disturbed the soil. There are natural disturbances, volcanic eruptions, landslides, erosion or deposition of soils, and these events all are followed with a series of plant species that come in to perform specific tasks. The first colonizers anchor the soil and provide ground cover and deposit nutrients when they die and decay. Eventually, a series of species take their place in the recovery of a disturbed area, sometimes crowding out the early weedlike species, sometimes living side by side. Ultimately, a dominant species like trees come to take over the area, forming a mature and stable landscape rich with niches for other species to inhabit.

The other interesting aspect of many plants that are considered weeds is that they could have a beneficial function that is not obvious. Some "weeds" condition the soil. I recently discussed this with a friend. He will have to regrade and reseed a recently completed yard because of buried septic and ground source heating systems. I suggested clover to nitrogenate the soil, but he was concerned that he would not be able to wipe it out once it was established. I suggested he let it stay to feed the honeybees, which are having a hard enough time struggling for survival.

We often become dismayed when a nonnative species takes over an ecosystem. I'm not sure we can be certain that this is a bad thing. The Great Lakes were so polluted that they were a tragedy just a few years back. With the invasion and profusion of the tiny zebra muscle, the lakes are now so clear that you can see down for 30 to 40 feet in some places. It just sits there with it's little shell open filtering the water. They determined that cattails remove heavy metals from marshlands. Some people have considered actively using them for remediation of polluted waterways. I saw a road crew spraying some kind of herbicide on roadside cattails just yesterday.

Another point that the guests made is that you might as well find a way to live with unwanted species, as it is virtually impossible to eradicate some. I know most people have heard that dandelions can be used to be in salads, so that is a direct use (which I have often thought would be to my benefit if civilization fell, I'd be able to eat the greens out of my yard). But there are other issues, such as the Asian Carp, an highly invasive species that it spreading in the rivers outside of Chicago. Apparently, these fish could be harvested without limits and would still thrive, and there is supposed to be a huge market for their meat in China. I heard that the Kudzu grass that is taking over in Australia is causing some to consider importing elephants from Africa to come and graze it back down to manageable proportions.

I liked the way the podcast guests described weeds. One quoted Ralph Waldo Emmerson, who said a weed is simply a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. Another noted that a common definition of a weed is a plant in the wrong place. He then asked, "What is the right place? Who makes the decision?" He noted that these answers are entirely subjective. A weed is a plant that gets in the way of your plans. Why not change your plans?

Their discussion of Invasive Species was interesting. They noted that the northern parts of our continent were scoured clear of all life during the ice ages. That means that everything we see is new as of 25,000 years ago. So invasive and non-native classifications beg the question of how do you declare the cutoff date for when such a distinction began. Most people do not know that many state flowers and insects are not native. Vermont has the Purple Clover and the Honeybee as the state flower and insect, when neither were here when the state was colonized by Europeans. For many people non-native species have always been there and are not considered an invader.

One of the guests remarked that all weeds are trying to do is green over empty ground, and for that, we should give them a second chance. A caller in to the program tried to counter that many native species are dangerous, poison ivy, trumpet vine, and the plant responsible for milk sickness. The author remarked that the berries of poison ivy are the most important food of Chickadees. He proposed that we need to take a planet centric view of all species and try to answer how they fit into the whole environment.

There was an interesting discussion of perception. The guest said that we should not embrace the native versus non-native difference, which is exceedingly emotional for some people. People like to dislike certain species. When altruism evolved, along with that was a distrust of people outside your own group. Maybe people were predisposed to have an us versus them viewpoint on the world. We just fall into this trap when it comes to species, we embrace the natives and we love to hate the non-native. It's a natural instinct of humanity, but not necessarily a useful one.

Another more recent podcast that I listened to says that we absorb and hold all kinds of micro RNAs from plants. They speculate that this enables us to make proteins with bigger building blocks and makes for an efficient metabolism, but also that we may have co-evolved with certain plant species whose chemical contribution gave us an edge. It's not just raw building blocks or minerals or other simple chemicals that are part of a good diet, it's part of the unique substance of a particular plant that can be quickly used by our bodies. Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out what there is out there before we arbitrarily wipe it out?

[NOTE: the field of yellow flowers that was thick with bees and butterflies was sprayed with a herbicide shortly after the pictures were taken.]

Stupid Voters

I was listening to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense episode 203 about "Upgrading the Electorate". He talked about the way most people are ignorant of public affairs and current events and how this makes us very poor voters. We do not feel in the least bit hesitant in voting on subjects that we know absolutely nothing about.

He sited an author in the podcast, Rick Shenkman, who wrote the book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter. He summarized the types of ignorance as follows:

1. Sheer Ignorance - no knowledge of the facts
2. Negligence - disinclination to seek facts
3. Wooden Headedness - people that want to believe only what they already believe
4. Short Sightedness - inability to see long term consequences of current events
5. Bone Headedness - simplicity and gullibility, biases

It's interesting because it runs the gambit from inattention, through people being manipulated or pre-disposed in certain ways, to people actively selecting their own viewpoints despite any outside influence or information. Dan Carlin says he thinks that it's not a matter of people being stupid, as in incapable of learning, as it is that they are not interested. My thought is that there is a portion of those not interested because it's too much work to figure things out. This is the appeal of Talk Radio. People figure things out for you.

I was also watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and he showed a summary of Republican speakers who felt quite comfortable vilifying liberals in one voice and playing themselves off as the victims in the next. It seemed odd to have someone simultaneously bullying and browbeating their enemy while claiming they were being taken advantage of or being treated unfairly. This kind of speech strikes me as strange because is it self apparent that it is inconsistent and cannot be correct, yet this does not stop people from spewing nonsense and expecting everyone to lap it up as the gospel.

Our Founding Fathers believed that the average person should not be allowed to vote, only the educated elite (this was a phrase that was so much more applicable in that era than today, yet you hear it so much today). Back around the time of the American Revolution, being well read was much more common in the upper classes. People of means took great pains to educated their children, most particularly their eldest sons, in order to prepare them to manage estates or take their place in the leadership of society. While the printing press was spreading literacy and information at a much greater rate than in times past throughout history, there were still practical bars to acquiring the reasoning and analytical skills to discern the facts from the sea of raw information. Books were expensive, and newspapers were prone to opinion and exaggeration. Many of the laboring class were illiterate and uninterested in changing that status. Women were considered beneath consideration, too, and not expected to be interested in reading and literature. The Founding Fathers were well-steeped in a Classical Education that included Latin and Greek and the history of the great Roman and Greek civilizations that spawned all higher theories on science and society. The Founding Fathers were concerned, too, that the passions of the crowd could sway the people and move them to enact laws that were not well reasoned for the long term, or select leaders that were not deliberate thinkers, but passionate and poorly directed hot-heads.

The Republican primaries are in full swing now, so the brand of idealism that we see being shared most extensively right now is Conservatism. I am biased on that score, because I am prone to paint conservatives as Religious people that see the science of evolution and geology as an enemy, or greedy people that see the science of climate change as a barrier to making money the old fashion way and not worrying about what the impact on the planet is. Michelle Bachman in particular strikes me as a candidate that is willfully ignorant of a great deal of reality, yet strikes a chord in some people that gives gravitas to her ridiculous statements like the idea that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation because some voter in a meet and greet line told her this (and because she already believed that nasty things happen to people that get vaccines).

It is easy to start thinking that we almost need people to take a test that proves that they are at least paying attention to current events before they vote, and better yet to take a test on basic government functions and U.S. history before they are eligible to vote. I've often wondered how many U.S. citizens would be unable to pass a U.S. citizenship/naturalization test (see http://www.sporcle.com/games/lilchocdonut/uscitz to see if you could pass the test). The reason we don't do this is because our countries laws reflect the belief that everyone is entitled to a vote. Never mind that this was never true in history, all the way back to Greek and Roman times, the Democracies that we were supposed to be emulating. Originally, military service or property ownership was the minimum requirement for voter eligibility. We've been expanding those rights for some time, until now we have universal suffrage and an 18 year old voting age. Tests to qualify voters have a bad history, from post Civil War times when they were used to exclude black voters, so there is justified resistance to such a system. There is also a sense that rich or influential people might mass power in our system, but if we are to be truly democratic, a majority of the voters can assert their rights or displace a powerful usurper.

In any case, it feels as if this inattention of voters is not a good thing. It corrodes democracy by making it easier for elected officials to take over power and make changes to society against the popular will simply because people are not paying attention or not understanding what happens. While I myself have been guilty from time to time of thinking, "people that don't know what is going on should not be allowed to vote!" I think it is more fair to say that I wish more people understood what is going on.

Igneous Rocks

We were in Colorado on vacation, enjoying the mountains and it got me wondering about geology and wishing I knew more. While we were in a small hotel, we were watching Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader. There was a question about rocks formed by extreme heat. The contestant answered that this rock was called lava, which made us laugh, and then admit that we did not know what it should have been, which was igneous.

As soon as I got home, I listened to more of a podcast of a Geology class from the School of Mines in Golden. He explained how these rocks form from flowing lava.

Then him mentioned Ship Rock, which we saw at the tail end of the vacation. It is the remaining core of an old volcano, which when you know that this is how it is formed only enhances the way it looks. The same can be said of Devil's Tower, which we saw on vacation about 4 or 5 years ago. That flow was slower and more laminar, and all the outside of the core is all eroded around. Ships Rock has lots of lateral flows, so it is very spiky and interestingly shaped.

I'm now totally into igneous rocks, particularly the cores of old volcanoes.

Ghost Town Construction

I went to Colorado recently and visited the Animas Forks region to see some ghost towns. Thoughts of how these communities were built and lived in inspired me to consider more deeply if it would be possible to learn how the buildings were actually built.

It's something that I do already, looking at buildings and trying to guess their age based on construction techniques. This is usually buildings or factories in cities, and since they are usually large with complex construction, there are a lot of clues. Large buildings had more of a chance of following standardized building procedures, sometimes building codes.

Buildings and houses in the mountains would be another thing entirely. Throughout most of the mining era, these communities were thrown together in some very harsh environments, far away from normal supply lines, and probably without any kind of code or building inspector. I noticed that some houses and buildings were sound, but others were not so sound. These communities were filled with buildings that are no longer standing. In one place, Capital City just west of Lake City, only one building survives. It was easy for me to visualize that as the mine played out and people started leaving the area, the last ones to stay were probably tearing the other houses down to use as firewood.

One thing I know about building in places other than the mountain is that you normally position the building on a foundation that goes below the freeze line so that it will not be subject to freeze thaw cycles and the instability and thrusting that comes with freezing soil.

The houses in Animas Forks were all built on grade without any basement. The ground they were built on was mostly rocky, either large rocks or solid shelves. This would have been an extreme challenge to anchor a building to. The other thing that I kept thinking about was how deep the snow would get in the winter. One storyboard mentioned that many of the homes were destroyed by avalanches, so how do you protect against that?

The whole line of thought made me think that it would be a great book idea - mining town building construction. You could have a fantastic time searching out the structures: locate them, analyze them, and map them. While it would be fantastic to have access to building records and find actual Bills of Materials, I believe that research would indicate that there are no records left of how things were constructed. It would have to be done by first hand inspection.

I was daydreaming while I was in Animas Forks about what I would do if I could go back in time. I figured their life in a mining camp was pretty harsh, so it would be good to make a bath house and water works. You could probably use solar energy to heat the water. It would not be hard to improve on the available construction materials. So much could be done with just the mining tailings to make sturdy foundations. I looked at the insides of the remaining houses in Animas Forks and saw what I thought at first was wallpaper, but later determined was material covering the walls to keep the cold out. It would not be that hard to construct avalanche splitters uphill from a house, and it would be very useful to use the stone to put the house into the side of a hill so that you would have some protection and heat from the ground. You'd have to lay in an enormous amount of food to stay there year-round. I imagine there comes a time in November or December where the roads close and do not re-open until spring.

I don't think I'm built of the sterner stuff it would take to stay over the winter up in the mountains. I do like the idea of poking around in those old mountain towns throughout a pleasant summer. Now all I need is an advance by a publisher and a winning lottery ticket and I'm there.

Robopocalypse

Daniel H. Wilson was recently interviewed by on Science Friday by Ira Flatow about his recent book Robopocalypse. He also has a previous book called How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

The premise of the book is that every machine with a computer chip goes out of control and tries to take over humanity. This is supposed to be in the near future, not much more advanced than now.

I've always wondered, when watching stories like Battlestar Galactica or the Terminator series, why the robots would want to wipe out people. What about their own self interest? Without humans, they wouldn't have more power through the innovation that humans provide. It seemed to me that robots would not be able to figure out new things very easily.

This made me think about the Robot Soul. What is the heart of a robot's being? What makes them tick? It seems like you would build in a willingness to do dangerous things and in exchange, they can have a new body if they fail. You constantly keep a copy of the robot's program, and if any particular robot gets destroyed in the process of carrying out their duty, you simply download that robot's program into a new body. You could also clone the program into multiple new robots, like having a child. For humans, the promise of never dying would be like immortality and appealing. The hope of being copied would be like procreation. Robots would have two of the things that humans want and strive for.

Years ago, Issac Asimov wrote about robotics and came up with the three laws of robotics. The gist of these rules was that a robot could do no harm to humans. This was commonly accepted by many to be a precondition of developing robots, that there would be some kind of safeguard built in. Yet today, we work on military robots to take the place of soldiers and program them to kill our enemy. This seems like a terrible idea to me. What if this technology was turned against us by our enemies? What if this technology grew aware and developed a conscience and decided that being used to kill a person's enemy was not right? What if they selectively turned against any person that ordered the robot to kill someone else? What if robots decided not to let humans order them to kill other humans?

Solution would probably be Avatars. The killing machines would be robots that would operated normally most of the time, then cede control when it was time to kill a person. At that time, humans would supply the controlling commands through a virtual interface, relieving robots of guilt or getting around the prohibition of killing humans. You have to figure we'll find a way around any restrictions if we feel we need that capability.

Life Makes Life

I was listening to two recent articles that had a common theme.

One was about a man that studied hail. He discovered that most hail contain bacteria in the center of the stone. This guy was slicing hailstones up in razor thin sections, and somehow figuring out how to see the growth rings in them, like the growth rings in a tree. In the very center, more often than not, he found bacteria. Not just any bacteria, a few strains of bacteria. Hail needs something crystalline to start freezing on, a starter seed to the hailstone. So it was fascinating to think that this was often a living thing. Certainly dust and other particles are capable of starting the process, too, but you would not think that there would be that much bacteria aloft in the atmosphere. It made me wonder if we were living on a sterile earth, where life was not present at all, would we have as much rain?

That leads back to the fact that we would not be living on this planet as it is if it were not for life. The methanogenic bacteria in Earth's early oceans are responsible for the high oxygen content in the atmosphere. Before this bacteria, the atmosphere was primarily methane, and poisonous to most life as we now know it. Without seas full of these early bacteria, we would not be living in the world we see around us now.

The other related article was about trees. Apparently, they sluff off some kind of bacteria that scientists found to seed rain clouds. In an area with a large amount of trees, much of the rain that is created may be the result of the trees seeding the clouds. This seems like a clear feedback loop. Trees make rain which makes trees. They also pointed out that cloud cover is healthier for trees because rather than blocking sunlight, it more often has the effect of diffusing it. This makes the radiation come to the trees in a variety of directions and gives a tree a greater ability to benefit from the sunlight. Less intense and direct sun and more sunlight going under leaves from a lateral direction. What a neat system of supply water and helping the trees grow. The growth of the forest or jungle is a self-sustaining action.

It shows that life is the key to making life. Once you get it started, it tends to build on itself.

Perturbations

I was listening to a climate scientist talk about the weather cycles on Earth. He talked about how certain changes, the main example being the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere by man, create feedback effects. He talked about positive and negative feedback, one being where the reaction or effect strengthens or adds to the initial condition or input, the other where it damps it out. In other words, one runs out of control and the other damps itself out.

We have two examples in our solar system of this, our sister planets Venus and Mars. In Venus, the greenhouse effect ran out of control and caused a surface so hot you can melt lead on it. On Mars, the atmosphere eventually left the planet, and it spiraled down to a cold dry planet.

Another point of the lecture was about just how many variables are involved, and their complex interplay. While CO2 rising traps greenhouse gas, it could also cause there to be more moisture in the air, which might be a shield or shade keeping out the sun or another blanket holding in the heat. Scientists debated this through the 70s and 80s and finally determined that more atmospheric water tends to trap more heat.

The point is that the rise of some conditions might kick off a new effect which counters the original input. They call these movements back and forth around a center "perturbations". There are effects which cause swings and others which slow them down, but if the swings start being too frequent or too far from the equilibrium average we've come to expect, this can cause the system to swing out of control.

Understanding this interplay of forces and variables will be the ultimate human challenge. We don't have any choice but to take on this challenge, but learning it will have another major benefit. If we take what we learn and apply it to Venus and Mars, we could very well push those systems in to stable, more Earth-like conditions. In the case of Venus, the planet is so close to Earth's size, that living on the surface would not require adjusting our bodies to a lighter or heavier gravity.

I have great hope that we will learn to dampen out the perturbations and control weather, first here at home, then maybe on our sister planets, changing them into secondary homes for us to spread out on.

Haste Makes Waste

I've got a Prius. Many people would probably stereotype me on that issue, figuring I'm politically or environmentally a certain way. Some people that get high mileage cars are just cheap. They don't want to spend the money on gas.

For me, it was a little bit of all that, but mostly, it's the engineering of efficiency. How do you get more for less?

So I find myself doing this thing they call Hypermiling (Hyper Mile-ing). The readout on the dashboard tells you what your instantaneous and average gas mileage are. And one screen you can select shows the instantaneous power efficiency. You drive around and you quickly learn (or relearn, or have dramatically emphasized to you) that quick starts and rapid acceleration are wasteful. If you can take the time to slowly wind up to speed, you will use a lot less fuel. And once you are going, it doesn't take as much energy to keep going.

It occurred to me that you might be able to get more mileage from premium gas. I figured that the higher octane might be enough to get enough more energy and more mileage to more than justify the price. I started thinking about this after my mileage had been going down and I had the dealer flush the injectors and got an immediate 20% jump in gas mileage. So I put in some premium gas and got another 10% boost. However, I found this to be a false savings, because I started driving more carefully at the same time. I found that the first tank was about the time it took to drain my battery. The thing is, when you hypermile, you tend to make the car run in all electric mode more often. However, it's the boost in speed you get from fuelled acceleration that charges up the battery. So after you hypermile for a while, you drain the battery down to the point where the motor is always running just to charge the battery. So instead of sitting quietly at a stop light with the motor off, you sit there with your gas engine idling just like any non-hybrid car. So there is a limit to how much you can save.

It was about this time that I started obsessing about getting solar panels for the car. I thought that if the battery would just recharge while it was parked at work or home, that it would be full at least once a day and I could hypermile around for a while, draining it. I thought about a sunshade for the window out of solar panels or a carport to park it in that has solar panels. The next problem is converting that power to the right voltage and then feeding it in to the battery without harming the car's electronics. People out there have done it, but there's nothing readily available off the shelf.

It occurred to me that any time you're in a hurry to do something, it costs you.

I was thinking about energy first. If you want it quickly and need it now, it costs you in who you have to buy it from or what it does to the environment. If you take the time to do it right, it's more sustainable.

But it's not just energy that costs when you rush it. Look at what happens with wars. When you rush to war, use up resources at a fearsome rate. It's wasteful of lives as well as respect and prestige in the world.

There are other examples, as well. There's that song that says you can't hurry love, and that's probably true most of the time. When you are smitten with someone, you can't just rush up to them and shout "I'm in love with you!" and expect this to be taken as anything but proof that you are nuts and not worthy of love.

It's kind of that way in sales, too. You have to wait for the sales to come to you to really start making good consistent sales. You can't call someone up every day and say "are you going to buy something from me today?!" and expect them to continue to take your calls. After a while, they'll make a point of not buying from you because you annoy them. If you've ever been to a car dealer and had the guy come up to you and say "what's it going to take to get you to drive off in this today?!" you know that this is the quickest way to make you want to leave and never come back.

I think weight loss is another example of haste being counter productive. If you do manage to loose weight really quickly, you run the risk of injuring yourself if it's through exercise, or making yourself unhealthy if it's through diet. And there's the rebound effect. Lose weight quickly and you become so hungry (at least I do). You have to take the time to lower your appetite while you are loosing weight.

So just like the tortoise and the hare, remember, slow and steady wins the race.

Cat Fight

Cats are cute cuddly soft little furballs, suitable for sitting on doilies or little velvet pillows. They are soft and helpless.

Anyone with any knowledge of cats knows that is simply not the case. We have lots of cats. There are outside cats that we feed that range from approachable to skittish, and inside cats that either spend all their time inside or like to go out when they can.

Valentine is an outside cat. She showed up last winter and has never let us pet her. She's not so scared of us that she runs at the sight of us, she's just leery and stays outside of arm's length. Last winter, there were more outside cats, and Valentine was at the very bottom of the pecking order. It seemed that none of the other cats liked her, or even tolerated her, and it seemed that she got the most abuse from the other cats. Valentine's nose would often have a huge scratch in it, and you just visualized her getting beat up by all the other cats.

If you imagine what a cat attack would look like, it would be pretty brutal. They have some seriously sharp and nasty claws. I've often wondered how bad a cat with absolutely no fear could hurt you if it suddenly went nuts and decided to attack. I would not want to find out, especially if I had shorts on. The other day, one of the inside cats, Eddy was coming into the cat door and got nailed by Valentine from behind. She was getting hit in the flank just as she ducked into the door. There was no blood and no apparent damage. The same attack would have easily killed a bird, and probably a rabbit. It makes you realize that these cute little kitties must be made of tough enough stuff to defend against attacks by themselves.

In fact, that's probably not a bad definition of most species. Their defenses are probably about evenly matched to their offensive abilities. Being as tough as it takes to survive the kind of attacks you yourself can dish out would be a prerequisite for survival.

The human political animal is the exception. It seems to me that the Republicans are made of sterner stuff than the Democrats. From what I always observe, the Republicans have a never ending supply of moves that smash any Democratic leaning or initiative. They always seem to state their opponents position and break it up and show it to be a sham before you even hear from the Democrats. It just doesn't even seem like a fair fight most of the time, except when you look at the outcome, which is government that pretty much hovers around the 50/50 point. Like my cat that gets hit in the side and waltzes in unharmed, perhaps there is more to this in the political animal than meets the eye.

Today's Antebellum Civil War

I've been fascinated by the Civil War for a long time. Most recently, I have been listening to a lecture on Civil War Reconstruction by Yale Professor David Blight. Most studies of the Civil War concentrate on the build up to the war and the battles and political struggles during the war. It's as if the war ended and was just over and forgotten, if you judge by what is usually taught on the Civil War.

So, given the current political divide and much of the debate going on in public now, it occurred to me that the current situation has some similarities to our country just before the Civil War.

One analysis I listened to about the Civil War broke down slavery as an economic system. It was profitable and successful, from an economic standpoint. There was a small amount of rich plantation owners that made an enormous amount of money off of slavery based agriculture, mostly cotton, but also tobacco. Slavery was a system which stole the labors of the slaves and caused them to toil and put all their efforts into the profits of their masters. They did not benefit from the system, to the contrary, they were trapped in the system with no way out and no recourse to escape or be treated more fairly.

Democrats in that pre-Civil War era had a direct stake in perpetuating this economic system that directly benefited such a small number of people. Whigs were not much better, they did not want (for the most part) to break down the system. Some of their motivation was not to upturn the economy, or to create a political rift in the country. Only the emergence of the Republican party brought out politicians that were more open about discussing the abolition of slavery.

I occurs to me that we here in present day America are a lot like that pre-Civil War society. We have two parties that protected economic systems that do harm to people. There can be no doubt that the default position for politicians today are that rich people are the capitalists that provide the prosperity of society and should not be interfered with, even when they exploit workers or the environment that we all live in and that should belong to all of us. We live in a world where the ultrarich are taxed at the lowest rate they have been in decades, and where workers' rights are more and more non-existent. Income disparity is higher than it has been since the late 20s. The power of unions is waning so rapidly that they have almost ceased to be a political force. The Supreme Court has declared that Corporations are people and that they cannot be restricted from spending unlimited money to influence politics.

For parallels to pre-Civil War society to be complete, there would have to be the emergence of a third party that may emerge from an existing party, but would be for championing the downtrodden class. Instead, in today's world, there has been the emergence of the Tea Party, which centers its attentions on keeping taxes low and shrinking the power of government in our lives. The primary beneficiaries of these ideas are ultra-rich and corporations, yet the average Joe Sixpack in the Tea Party does not understand or appreciate this. Many blue collar or low wage workers in our country support the small minority of ultra-rich in their rights and pursuits. There was a poll that revealed that most people believe that they, too will strike it rich some day, and do not want to finally arrive only to find all their rights and privileges taken away. This is a strange situation where there are a large number of people who have been convinced to vote and act against their own self interests.

So, where will we go from here? There was an interesting analysis of unrest in the Arab world, the so-called Arab Spring, where this was shown as the masses of young and powerless society finally rising up against those entrenched in wealth and power.

I've often thought that one reason Communism failed because it was never actually tried (don't get me wrong here, I also believe pure Communism would fail, but that's not my point here). "Communism" as it was set up in Soviet Russian and Red China is not a true redistribution of wealth and power, but a concentration of wealth, power, and privilege into a small elite group, which is no different than what happens when Capitalism runs away and concentrates wealth and power in a small minority. One of the differences between Soviet and Chinese communism and pure runaway capitalism is that they paid lip service to the rights of the workers (as they trampled them).

My frustration is that you need the promise of profits and wealth in order to drive innovation and motivate investment in technological and economic progress, but that it inevitably leads to individuals or corporations trying to control that technology. It does not serve society as a whole to allow technology to be controlled and restricted by individuals or individual corporations. How is this any different from people's fears of government control of tech? I tend to agree with government oversight when it protects people's health or the environment, but not when it slows down or restricts the development of technology. Of course, another major problem with communism was that it tried to control and direct technology and the markets, which also proved to be disastrous. Just like you need biological diversity in order to have a healthy environment, you need economic diversity, which is really nothing more than many companies trying many different things, in order for the most valid technology to emerge and serve society as a whole.

I believe that we have to find a way to correct the imbalance, protect individuals and the environment, and make opportunity more widespread and accessible, without taking away the profit motive and the situation that allows for good ideas to be rewarded.

Altered Self

I was listening to a podcast of Fresh Air the other day about a person who had suffered a stroke. The stroke altered the man's personality. Doctors determined that the stroke had killed a portion of his brain. As with many other examples of people with damaging brain injuries, this case would have provided proof of a connection between a certain part of the brain and certain higher functions.

It would be difficult to explain the effects exactly, but the man went from being a chiropracter, a logical and methodical person with a strict schedule and a disciplined approach to life to a artist. He could not remember most of his past life, from people's names to all the training he had. He was care-free, not in the sense that he was happy, but because he was not capable of the kind of deep thinking that would cause him to worry.

He became a prolific or maybe more accurately, obsessive artist. He was constantly making pencil drawings of intricate patterns.

As his recovery progressed, he became fully functional, seemed pretty normal in conversation, but was a completely different man.

It occurred to me as I listened to the story that this new personality must have been there before the stroke, it was just suppressed by the parts of brain that died during the stroke. While the stroke had the effect of wiping out his old personality, who's to say that's all bad? He seemed much happier in his new life, less stressed and less bothered by the cares of the world. Granted, he was also probably not as successful or organized, but he was happy.

It made me think that if the brain contains other personalities, and they are just submerged, perhaps there is a way to bring them out. If there are dominant parts of the brain overruling other aspects, maybe there is a way to suppress the dominant personality and become a different person. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to find a way through meditation or hypnosis to allow emergence of new personality? Wouldn't it be nice to take a vacation from yourself and experience a new you that would relax and find more enjoyment in life?

I realize that people can alter their personality by taking drugs, but the effects are more harmful. The pathways in the brains are being damaged and rewritten under the influence of drugs. There would not be a great deal of control in what your results would be, what personality or trait would emerge.

If there are aspects of your personality already present, but submerged, finding a way to bring them out could result in an unexpected outcome just as uncontrolled as taking drugs.

I guess my idea when I considered what would be inside your head, waiting to be discovered was that you could dial in the changes to the type of personality you wanted on demand. This is probably not a realistic idea. Any change in personality is a risky spin of the mental roulette wheel. Perhaps some day psychiatrists might find a way to use this idea to enhance therapy, but for now, it's probably more along the lines of "don't try this at home".

Red Tide

We've spent a lot of time worrying about the Chinese and what their economy and way of business is doing to our economy. While this obsession is in vogue currently, it was present in a different flavor years ago. I remember reports about the trade deficit with the Chinese going back to the days that they were still totally Communist and the pro-business policies had not been tried yet. Yet, the flavor of these worries seems to be escalating. Now, you are more likely to hear fears that this deficit is fueling the Chinese military, or that having the Chinese buying up U.S. government debt is a dangerous thing.

Back in the 90's there was a big movement toward "Free Trade". I can't remember whether this phrase cropped up before or after the public arguments about extending "most favored nation" status to the Chinese in trade arrangements. There was an announcement each year that they had once again extended this status to the Chinese, yet it always seemed to me that they were toying with holding the status back because of the way that the Chinese treated their people or would not allow information out of the country. Then there was a movement to formalize this arrangement into a more permanent status and you started hearing about Free Trade all the time. Those that tried to sell the public on Free Trade kept repeating standard arguments. Early on, there were concerns about losing American jobs to the Chinese. Advocates were saying that the jobs that would go away to China would be low wage jobs and would clear the way for Americans to do higher wage more skilled jobs. They said that the American public would benefit by having access to low priced goods.

This happened, to a degree. American manufacturing started to decline in fields like textiles and steelworking, but this higher wage higher skilled segment of manufacturing did not grow to a degree to outstrip the losses in the low skilled fields. There can be little debate that manufacturing in the U.S. has declined noticably in the last 15 years.

Many that advocated Free Trade talked also about how it would bring about Globalization and an equalization of wages. The problem with this is that they were not very honest about emphasizing what that meant. If you think about it, equalization of wages means a successful exporting country eventually has to deal with labor shortages and this results in wage inflation and rising prices. A country that imports more will eventually pay lower wages because the manufacturing base will decrease and the number of workers to fill the jobs will increase, making labor in oversupply. The result is a lowering of wages. This has in fact happened in the U.S.

The natural result in this is that laborers will tend to come together in their wages. The problem is that Americans expected that this meant that eventually other counties wages would rise to meet ours. They did not consider that equalization tends to be a lowering on one side and a rise on the other. When you average two numbers, the average is lower than one number and higher than the other. The only way to get to wage equity is if American wages drop. What we did not foresee was a rapid rise in Chinese inflation. Reports out this week show that the inflation rate in China is rising their wages much faster than our manufacturing decline is lowering our wages. The Chinese standard of living is leaping forward. People are buying cars in huge numbers, and wages are rising faster than expected. Couple this with energy prices and resource scarcities, and things rapidly start to tilt back in our favor.

In fact, the Energy markets are probably the thing that will turn around the discrepancy the quickest. World population continues to rise, and energy demand shows no sign of scaling back. Oil as a source of energy is finally reaching the end of its natural life, with environmental and geopolitical concerns making oil use less savory each year (not to mention the fluctuation nature of the price of petrochemical energy). Coal, too, is reaching a limit, this time from environmental pressures. Alternative energy sources will be needed to convert us over to our future energy needs, probably a combination of Nuclear, Wind, Solar, BioFuel, GeoThermal, and Tidal sources. No one of these forms will be enough, it will probably require a combination of all of them. Even if Fusion energy becomes feasible in the near future, all this means that there will be a huge need for jobs here in the U.S. to satisfy these needs. You can only make your energy at home, and while some things like wind turbines and solar panels, can be purchased from China, I suspect that the cost to ship them using fossil fuels will make it more feasible in the long run to make them at home. This means that many of the manufacturing jobs lost in the last few years will be coming home.

So I see in the upcoming economic climate the perfect storm: for advancing our economy and reversing the losses since Free Trade came into fashion.

Crunching Numbers

I listened to the 2/11/11 Science Podcast about a month ago where they interviewed the author of a paper about the World's technological capacity to handle information.

One of the co-authors of the paper, Martin Hilbert discussed how they were trying to determine how the world has changed in handling information, which he defines as storing, communicating, or computing the information. Communication of data is either one way, broadcasting, or two way, telecommunication. Computation is compiling information by computers or little controllers that are in everything.

Nature is awash in information, but we don't notice or capture most of it. Much of the information that we do capture has a tendency to be lost and little of the rest of it is actually compiled into a useful form.

My thought when I hear this was that the power of information goes up exponentially as it is stored, communicated, and then compiled. In fact, the biggest limitation in using information in the past was computational power. This is why individuals like Newton, who developed Calculus and found a way to reduce information into its simplified essence were responsible for great leaps in thinking.

Genius, or even a well trained mind, is the human equivalent of an efficient or effective compiler of information. Someone that has absorbed a lot of information and has a brain that is good at sorting it out and compacting it into core kernels, essential facts, and basic truths. Sometimes this happens with some insight because a person is in the zone or attuned to the phenomenon they are observing. Sometimes it happens because the person’s mind is a combination of a steel trap, but also a fine filter of the information, or a good discriminator of good information and bad information. This is where written history multiplies human capacity. The deeper the knowledge bed for a fertile mind to till, the more productive the output can be. When linked with the rapid access of information, even people with only average compilation skills can put together powerful constructs and conclusions.

This power of computation, of compiling information to its essence, is an idea whose time has come. Recently, a computer named Watson was put on the game show Jeopardy to compete against humans. He readily beat the humans, but the designers of Watson were frank about the machine’s limitations. It can compile huge amounts of data quickly, but it doesn't know what the information means, or which computations are more valuable than others. They gave an example of one possible application for Watson by saying that a computer with his capabilities could be designed and tasked to read all the medical journals available from this point back and then continuing into the future after it was put into service as new information is learned or collected. If provided with a medical case, the information and symptoms of a particular patient, the computer could spit out all cases that correlated with the data. Some of it would be gibberish, coincidentally related data that is not actually pertinent to the particular case. The power of the computer could be exploited by mating it with a skilled medical person, who could look at the possibilities that the computer suggested and determine which is most likely. The computer crunches vast amounts of information, but the person interprets what that information means.

I've often thought about this in my work, how the information, if compiled properly, could work to shortcut the amount of time spent fumbling around trying to figure out things. Can you imagine if your workload could be culled down to a small amount of more certain actions? The amount of time you could save just nailing down sure things would be tremendous. I’ve stopped listening to news fluff programs and have been getting a lot of my information from podcasts that I’ve vetted and culled until I have a small core that is a source of facts that I trust. I find it easier to compile the truth of the situation when you listen to just the pure sources that dig deep into core truths and try not to waste time shouting obscenities people as they try to walk by and mind their own business.

So the fascinating interview about the interesting paper left me with a lot of hope about the future, but I had to spoil it by thinking about how this truly translated into current reality. People now are awash in broadcast information. Much of it is advertising, a case of questionable information at best, as it is designed to try to persuade you to purchase something, whether you need it or not. Then there is political information, which is very much like advertising. It is designed to try to get you to buy a political ideology and to try to persuade others to join this ideology, and to contest those that do not believe your positions. This poisoning of information has corrupted news sources, as people with pre-conceived ideas are choosing their news sources based on whether these sources are putting out information that they already agree with, and ignoring any data source that conflicts with their dearly held beliefs. The information is “compiled” in a deliberately deceptive manner. This is fed to the public, complete with instructions to disregard or react with hostility to anyone that questions or contradicts the core ideology.

This is bad enough, but even more problematic is the dumbing down of the data. Compilations that amount to “bad man hurts animals” or “tragic tale is villain’s fault” are often the main thrust of news programs. It’s as if people attention spans are too short to absorb the full truth and nuances of actual events. They would rather be fed a pre-digested take on events, even if it lacks depth of understanding or even basic veracity. People sometimes turn away from the complicated dialog to fixate on the simple and easy to comprehend story about the iconic events that often dominate news cycles, yet really amount to nothing important. It’s noise. Just like when a signal is corrupted by static, our information stream sometimes gets clogged by rubbish. This makes it hard to hear the real truth when it is being drowned out by random loud annoying noise. Sometimes noise such as this can generate heat, as if the masses have listened to the lunatic scratching his nails on the chalkboard and screaming about the end of the world. You listen to such cacophony at your own risk.

I believe that what happened in Egypt and is trying to happen in the Middle East and places like China is that the raw compilation power of the general public is having the wool stripped off of their eyes for the first time. When the raw truths emerge, populations turn to their governments and leaders that have been contradicting those truths and become enraged and intolerant toward them. Propaganda and misdirection break down when we are awash in information. This can be truly enlightening and empowering for those under the thumb of a repressive regime, but you can imagine that they can be terrifying for those powerful leaders who built their massive house of cards on a foundation of lies and misdirection. This is not only true for governments, but for personalities and pundits and for large corporations. The key here is that pure unadulterated information is available to the masses so that they can decide what is right, what is the compiled essence of that information.

This information revolution is on an exponential track. That is what is really scary about it. What is going to happen to us when our ability to understand starts to approach our desire to focus our attention to a subject. Verner Vinge is the author of a book called Beyond Realtime, where he speculated that people’s understanding will accelerate so rapidly that we will simply evolve to the next realm. In his fictional account, most people simply disappeared. They had been linked mind to mind through a vast internet of humans that could communicate directly with the network and each other by their thoughts. Eventually, this lead to a hive mind kind of mentality and speculation that humans graduated to beings that no longer required physical bodies. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and author who has written a book called The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. His work contains much the same conclusion. You can feel this acceleration of information and looming growth of computation embedded in society. The only question is whether it’s more like the coming of great things or doom.