Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara died recently. A confessed unconvicted War Criminal, McNamara was a logitician for the firebombing campaigns on Japan, and a reluctant architect of the Cuban Missle Crisis and most significantly, the Vietnam War. In addition to being a profoundly intelligent and capable CEO, Cabinet Secretary and World Bank Chief, Mcnamara was striking for his deep reflection and appreciation for the moral complexity of his actions as revealed in the excellent documentary Fog of War (torrent).

Here is the synopsis of an interview at Berkeley in 2004 including a webcast.

Who better to deduce the lessons and folly of War than a man who was its Commander. Here are a list of his 11 lessons:

1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10. Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

Controversial, terrible, and flawed as he was, a great man has died.

All the Pb in Zhong Guo

This story from the financial press ignores what is really going on. Forget importation of toxic goods; why is Zhong Guo so backwards that they are even manufacturing toys, or other consumer products, that contain lead. If Zhong Guo is ever to be part of an advanced glorious civilistation, this will have to stop.

C-SPAN Funding

Given the lack of commercials or NPR style begathon fund-raising and the intended lack of political bias of C-SPAN, it is surprising to learn from their recent public service announcements that they do not receive public ie government money. They are in fact sponsored as a public service by the US Cable Television companies.

We all owe these companies a debt of gratitude for documenting and archiving governmental proceedings, bringing more openness to government, and making it widely and freely available without a hint of commercialism or political favouratism. This is a task which should have been the responsibility of the National Archives in a well run government, yet corporate charity has come through to do the job better and cheaper than a Government run programme ever could.

Manuel Zelaya - Drugs Policy of an Ousted Honduran Presidente

We do not pretend to know the motivations for the recent coup of Presidente Manuel Zelaya, overthrown by members of the Honduran Army last week. Was the CIA involved? These are open questions.

All else aside, we do want to commend and support el Presidente on one particular issue. He was strongly in favour of ending the oppressive and immoral 'War on Drugs.'

It is always suspicious when such a person is overthrown, particularly when the CIA is known for having a history of profiting from the drugs trade and political meddling in the region. As Alex Jones stated, 'The Drug Dealers want to make sure the Drugs stay illegal.'

First Human in Space

Apparently Yuri Gagarin was not the first person in space. It was cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Illysushin. Other conspiracies are also alleged.

Documentary Link

Digital Currency Trading Declared Illegal in China

Virtual Currencies threaten the power of governments by weakening their grip over the medium of exchange - ie Fiat Currency. In that sense, it is not surprising to see one of the more Authoritarian States definitively cracking down on Virtual Currency exchange. In practise, this will lessen the booming virtual currencies business and put many Chinese "gold farmers" out of work, but generally drive the digital currency market to ever higher levels of sophistication and security.

We have touched on this issue before.

An exposition on the topic of secure digital currencies can be found in David Friedman's Future Imperfect.

We suspect that the collapse of the value of the private US Federal Reserve Dollar will spark a real push for legalisation of competing Commodity backed digital currencies.

The Often Misleading State of Electronic Waste Recycling

PBS Frontline featured a disturbing piece recently concerning the processing of electronic waste. With an undercover investigation, Frontline revealed how Americans and Europeans are assured they are "recycling" electronic waste safely and locally. Instead it is all loaded onto containers that are shipped to Ghana or the southern Chinese city of Guiyu where people work in extremely dangerous conditions burning plastics, and poisoning themselves with heavy metals to extract trace amounts of precious metals. The waste is transported under the guise of "donations." While Africa particularly needs electronics if they have any hope of ever developing, Westerners should be made aware of the environmental and human dangers of e-waste "recycling," and law enforcement agencies ought to investigate fraud and environmental destruction in this regard. Hearing that one is "recycling" tends to eliminate a feeling of guilt for many Westerners, but the reality in this case is far from that.

Galapagos Tourism

Respect the nature of the Galapagos and the importance it had in informing Evolutionary Science, by never going there. Policymakers should strictly limit the number of allowed visitors or residents through licensing and taxation, and give collected rents to foundations which protect other nature preserves.

The Google God

Tonight's discourse:

Pace: I really think once people realise the efficiency, many will start programming to the Google Ap engine


Consigliere: uuuuuuuuuugh
that's a TERRIBLE idea
we already have one giant fucking monolith, i.e. Microsoft
why would we want to trade one for another?
the last thing the web needs is a single point of failure, like if google goes down and takes everybody's webapps with it


Pace: they are at least better than M$ - should theoretically still be reployable elsewhere without too much modification


Consigliere: they're only tbetter than M$ at the moment b/c htey';re not as big/dominant
but they certainly will become so
and there's a huge difference between "theoretically" and "in realitiy"


Pace: they do support open source though


Consigliere: it doesn't matter
I"m glad they do
but it'd still be a single point of failure


Pace: agreed


Consigliere: and god only knows what they'd do with all that data once they had it


Pace: they would become God


Consigliere: yeah, but a God beholden to capitalist shareholders


Pace: yes


Consigliere: it woudl be very Old Testament


Pace: haha

The Iranian Revolution

When one attempts to shut down or contain the Internet to suppress a discontented populace, one has lost all legitimacy to rule. خدا بزرگ است.

Augmented Reality and other Smartphone News

We've been holding out on buying a smart phone given the rapid acceleration taking place. Some of the applications we have seen are quite impressive. Here is one: Wikitude. Wikitude takes GPS and phone camera input, and overlays points of interest on the image.

By the way, if you check out the Recommended Stories section, you will see more reasons NOT to get an iPhone. Once again, Apple's insistence on running their users' lives drags down the company. Apple has banned an application which remotely administers legal torrent software, and now has also banned the Electronic Freedom Frontier's RSS application because they linked to a parody video Apple found potentially politically incorrect.

Information Technology in a Free Society should be used to enable Free Speech and Expression. We can not abide a company with such anti-human business practices, unless compelled by an oppressive regime as in Israel, Iran, or Zhong Guo. A California based company protected by the US Bill of Rights has no such excuse. We posit that in a well regulated market, such suppressions themselves would be illegal. In the meantime, boycott Apple.

US Foreign Policy Under President Obama

We voted for Barack Hussein Obama for one primary reason: foreign policy.  Having traveled as Americans overseas, we have seen how much antipathy has been created against the American Empire by the mismanagement of the Bush regime.  Barack Obama brings a fresh, worldly perspective to the Executive Branch which has been badly lacking for the last decade.  His ethnic heritage adds to his allure and his goodwill, especially in Africa.  His manifest intellect, open-mindedness, and respect for all people, combined with his brilliant oratory in the style of martyred human rights activists has made him a "Rock Star" both inside and especially outside the United States.

Isolationist Conspiracy Theorists will point to Obama's ethnicity as a strategy by Globalist Power-brokers, to command much greater leadership in Africa as a prelude to economic recolonisation and competition with the Chinese in the region.  This agenda may indeed come to pass, but is not sufficient reason to oppose Obama.  After all, the Americans generally take a greater humanitarian interest in Africa than do the Chinese or many African leaders themselves in recent years.  It should be stated though that despite any rhetoric and recent good intentions, the American track record in Africa has ranged from ignorance and neglect to enslavement.  

Conspiracy theories aside, this is 'Change [in Which] We Can Believe.'

Japanese Gardens

Stumbled Across this one. Well Designed site of Kyoto gardens.

Zeitgeist

I have been remiss in addressing many issues on this forum, let alone keeping up with the current events. I do apologise as there is much to be said, and much to be reported. Zeitgest is a propaganda film worth seeing. It addresses a very rough history of the origin of the Christian myth in Western Mythology with connections to astrology. This is somewhat interesting and entertaining though by no means a BBC documentary. Next, a stright up 9-11 Truth Conspiracy section (which I dont buy and do not recommend) ended with an informative and largely correct section on the origins, illegality, and fraud that genuinely is the Federal Reserve Banking Cartel.

Zeitgeist Addendum, the sequel, is even better. It refreshes us to the problems, and again addresses the Federal Reserve, fractional banking fiasco. It misunderstands monetary dynamics and fundamental economics in many respects,but makes some excelent points. Next it features the Economic Hitman followed by ample time to a living treasure, Jacque Fresco, and the Venus Project. .

By the way, I visited Jacque last march in Venus and will have more to say on him including a filmed interview.

In telling you to watch these films, know also that I do not agree with at least 50% of its assertions and analyses. Please also read and watch the criticisms which have merit, ironically coming from other Conspiracy Theorits who agree with most of the major premises but not the analyses or conclusions. Alex Jones. G Edward Griffin.

From Griffen:

All of the evils to which this program alludes are the result, not of the free enterprise system, but of the abandonment of free enterprise and the adoption of collectivism. This program creates a mythological boogeyman and then advocates more of the very thing that has brought us to the mess we are in today.

I think it is safe to say that money, trade and free enterprise as general technological systems are not the root of all our problems as Zeitgeist suggests. The redistribution of wealth is debatable as are laws and restrictions of markets and limitation of free contract. Money however is an inevitable property of combining scarcity, divisibility, transferability, durability and common perceived value.

The real battle emerging is between collectivist central-planning green technocrats - and the libertarian, self-sufficient, privacy-loving anarcho-Capitalists - perhaps these should be our emerging and conflicting dominant paradigms. Throw in some chaos from Fundamentalist Abrahamic Apocalypse Cult Fascists and Nihilists. Welcome to the Future.

The Trade

Go long Gold with stocks like GLD or more securely with a VIA MAT vault and private, tradable, liquid market through BullionVault. Higher priced GoldMoney is an alternative. With BullionVaut you can buy and sell gold in London, Zurich and New York.

Go long other precious/industrial metals: Silver (SLV, Goldmoney, and soon BullionVault), Platinum (PHPT), Palladium (PHPD), Copper (COPA), Steel

Go long the mineral slime Crude Oil (CRUD) and oil services companies particularly non-American companies. American Oil companies make huge profits and will make even more in the near future, but they could easily become subject to Windfall Profits Taxes under an Obama Administration. PetroChina (PTR) Petrobras (PZE) etc.

Go long Agricultural Commodities: Wheat (WEAT), corn, rice, cotton etc.

Go long Dividend Paying Value stocks in non-American companies, especially in the Developing World, that have strong balance sheets and are essential for civilisation. This includes mining companies, utility companies, etc. Later I will provide some specific recommendations.

America is a sinking ship. The Titanic really was struck on September 11, 2001 when the wars began, and the Federal Reserve began lowering interest rates, effectively rolling the Dot Com bubble into the Financial and Housing Bubbles which have just collapsed. Perversely we are now in the strange situation where investors are investing more in the unsinkable Titanic empire because they think it is more stable than any alternatives. As a result, the final bubble which has yet to burst is the United States Dollar bubble. The profligate borrowing, consumption, and deficit spending by the American Government and American Consumer has limits. When those limits are finally reached and the World decides to stop throwing good money after bad in lending to the United States, there will likely be a hyper-inflationary spiral, exchange controls, potential rationing of goods, and socialisation of most remaining wealth in the United States through taxation and inflation. No indication from the political leaders entering power suggests otherwise.

Now is a phase of the financial market in which traditionally safe strategies such as going long AAA bonds, going long Blue Chip companies, holding cash in a bank, or holding cash in a mattress do not make sense as a means to preserve let alone appreciate wealth. Given the artificially low interest rates, and regular "liquidity injections" on the order on trillions of dollars, there is naught but destruction of the value of the dollar in the post. In this scenario, if one has good credit and can borrow at a low interest rate - borrowing to invest in commodities and non-US assets could be a brilliant leveraged play for those with some risk tolerance. It is in effect a short sale of the US Dollar.

Currencies such as the Yen and CHF are probably safer plays than most others, but they are still fiat currencies exposed to political risk of inflation and devaluation.

Lastly, listen to Peter Schiff (Video, Radio Show) and Jim Rodgers (Video) and make up your own mind. Also read through the many pieces I have shared through Google Reader on the topics of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Financial Markets.

Warning: All trading and "investing" is gambling and involves exposure to losses in real wealth.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley deserves great attention for his deep intellect as well as his analysis of the human condition and the potentials for human life and society and the dangers of power and control enabled by emerging technology.  Huxley, who wrote 'Brave New World' in the 1930s clearly saw much more clearly into the future than most other major intellectuals of his day.  To that end listen to Huxley's "Ultimate Revolution" speech at UC Santa Barbara March 20, 1962.  

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Q & A

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Lastly, read his books.

The Wire

Available on any major torrent tracker, the HBO's 5-season television series The Wire is one of the best shows ever made. The Wire focuses on organized crime, drug abuse, poverty, social services, law enforcement, and politics in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore inner city, like so many inner cities in America, has gone from a once developing industrialised center to a third world backwards wasteland of despair and violence. The fuel for this downward spiral is not surprisingly the war on drugs and its selective or sporadic enforcement and large profit potentials for dealers and suppliers. In contrast to "the game" of drug dealing and related crime, there exist precious few realistically attainable economic alternatives than a life of crime and violence for those born into it. The series addresses all of these issues directly, deeply, and poignantly. The show proves its social value by making it clear that the most effective way to address the disastrous economic situation of the inner-city is to decriminalise all forms of drug sale and use whilst allowing a protected environment for various charitable and social services to administer care to those in need unhindered. Besides its value for the exploration of American inner city life, corruption, and social ills, The Wire entertains and captivates with well-developed, interesting characters at all levels of position and power. Watch consecutively and in order.

9.7 IMDB rating.

The creators of the Wire have a new mini-series, Generation Kill, on HBO.

Impeach Bush, Impeach Cheney

I am watching live Dennis Kucinich calling for the Impeachment of the President and Vice President on the floor of the House. Rep. Kucinich is one of only a small handful of honest politicians in Washington. You can look for this speech on cspan.org or youtube. This post by Brad DeLong outlines some of the impeachable offenses:

David Kurtz writes:

Talking Points Memo | Phase II: Here are the key points from the reports, according to a press release from Sen. Jay Rockefeller's office:

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

These gross violations by Richard Cheney and George W. Bush to take care that the laws be faithfully executed are High Crimes, demanding immediate impeachment and removal from office.

Kx

K and the more comprehensible Q are languages created by Artur Whitney based on APL. Kdb+ is the database system and interpreter for these languages. Kdb+ allows extremely efficient analysis of high-volume real-time and historic data simultaneously in a column based database. At $100,000 per Dual-Core Processor license, K is absurdly priced and only affordable for large financial institutions and the United States military. K is a vector based language with analogies to mathematics and human language. Nearly every character represents either a noun, verb, or adverb allowing extremely terse and efficient development and processing for those who are able to wrap their heads around the syntax.

K is powerful enough that an experienced quantitative analyst with the full range of tools could go from an idea, to a full tick-level back-test, to a fully deployed trading system in under an hour.

While this product is unfordable to nearly everyone in its full form, Kx Systems has released a limited version of the software free of charge. I highly recommend anyone interested in computer languages, analysis, finance, etc. to download and explore this amazing software which takes less than 200 KB on disk including the interpreter, an http server, and socket connectivity!

As a final note for those with a particular interest in providing programming services, it is our understanding that a capable K programmer averages about $250,000 per year working for a large investment institution.

Population Control

The concept of being "Green" is gaining increasing momentum in the developed world. One hopes that the removal of the Bush regime from power will result in improved legislation to slow the decline of the Earth's natural wealth which is being rapidly depleted. Bush aside, no major policy leader in any nation except China has bothered to propose measures to curb the growth of population. Meanwhile, European countries and many other countries have policies which encourage childbirth and increasing population seemingly to support their aging and selfishly infertile populations whilst reducing the need for importation of foreign labourers. While the economic decisions of humans are ultimately to blame for most environmental destruction, the quantity of humans certainly contributes directly to these problems as does the population of any pest species. We have already mentioned on this blog the 12 Monkeys scenario. In the spirit of Malthus, population limitation must be made a priority for governments. If measures are taken quickly to impose limits on population growth, 12 Monkeys can be avoided.

Unlike most of human history, we are now at a stage of having not just exceeded, but having overwhelmed the carrying capacity of our environment given the standard of living that we demand. In the absence of extremely harsh environmental regulation and economic restriction, Reproduction can no longer be seen as a right, but as a privilege, one which must be approved and earned by the collective authority. China's template solution allows only one child per couple and imposes varying degrees of penalties for any violations. A better solution would be one of progressive taxation. The degree of progression could be debated, but the overall outcome should be a birthrate which is less than or equal to the deathrate.

Such scheme would also have a positive effect on economic development, education, economic opportunity, and wealth per capita in nearly every region on Earth.

Room Temperature Superconductivity

If the research conducted by a Canadian and German team proves valid, scientists will have made an enormous leap by creating a room temperature superconductor with highly compressed Silane, SiH4. Superconductors can transmit electricity with miniscule resistance thus reducing energy loss. Since electric current generates magnetic fields, superconductors are required to generate enormously strong and sustained magnetic fields. MRI machines and the Large Hadron Collider at Geneve, Suisse are examples of the application of superconductors, but require expensive cooling.

A significant application of cheap superconductivity would be magnetic levitation.

*Update - I have been informed by an astronomer that the pressures required to acheive this (in the gigaPascals or millions of Atmospheres) are far in excess of anything we could engineer for industrial purposes, and are akin to the pressures existing at the center of Jupiter where hydrogen is metalic. We will have to keep waiting for cheap, practical room temperature superconductors.

Creative Zen

I have been the happy user of an Apple iPod 4th generation for a few years now. Aside from issues of hard drive failure, I was impressed most especially with the sleek design of the device, elegant in form and function, intuitive to navigate, and possible to control with one thumb often without looking. With the advent of the video iPod, the inevitable successor, Apple began falling into old, protectionist, sclerotic patterns. The formats which will play on the video iPod are limited only to Apple's proprietary format, supporting neither divx nor xvid, the most common formats for compressed digital video. Instead the video iPod owner was forced to convert their videos to Apple's format or even to rip their own DVDs. The Apple format is itself very low quality and conversion further destroys quality.

Last Christmas, while Apple was cashing in on $300 Video or Touch iPods and $2000 iPhones (inclusive of contract) I gave my partner a $150 refurbished Creative Zen M player. It is as good as new, for half the price of a video iPod. The Zen plays all the major video formats. I was really sold on it when a friend pointed out divx and xvid capability and the A/V converter cable available for $5 delivered. It allows one to watch video content from the Zen on a television in high quality. Creative further does not impose any inane software requirements to use their products, ie iTunes and the inexcusable Quicktime. For anyone interested in a portable media player, I strongly suggest considering Creative products.

Apple seems to have some major philosophical shortcomings: image over substance, dominance over compatibility. They have been guilty of this from the beginning. Though they are first to market with very nicely designed products, their greediness in trying to dominate their market and every file format that is used on their system or software that runs on their platform ultimately alienates users and erodes market share.

If you want an iPod, consider Creative: the interface is not as slick as Apple, but they are more functional and cheaper than the Apple version.

GWT Conference

In December of 2007, I attended the Voices that Matter: Google Web Toolkit conference in San Francisco. This was my first professional technical conference and I found it a very valuable experience. I had only been coding webpages for a year since discovering this technology. I was all at once surrounded by all the developers and experts who could answer all my questions and teach me so much more besides.

I was particularly interested to meet the engineers from Google, the company that fascinates me, gives me hope, inspiration, and a little envy. They were all brilliant, nerdy people as I suspected, deserving to work for the top firm in the world. All of my hopes for Google as a benevolent and beneficent force in society were strengthened and confirmed by the conference. If I have not said enough already about it, this technology is wonderful for any java developer looking to develop a web application. I have developed front-end database applications with this, basic marketing websites, and furthermore have developed a financial trading application with it, all in java with no knowledge of javascript or DOM.

I commend the Palace Hotel for hosting the conference and Prentice Hall and Addison-Wesley for doing a magnificent job organising and filming the conference. All the videos from every session are freely available on youtube.

Furthermore, given the wonderful time I had seeing friends and relatives in the area, I am all the more convinced that the Bay Area as the capital of technology is a good place for a person like me to establish myself. It has a horribly lacking transportation system unfortunately, but adequate enough if you have 2 hours to get from A to B. European engineers ought to redesign the entire infrastructure.

Panasonic Toughbook CF-74 Review

Here is a video of a Panasonic Toughbook, and another. Pansonic's line of well designed, and durable laptops is far superior to any other I have seen. Their retail price is absurdly high for this, but somehow maintain a more reasonable secondary market (ie ebay) where they can be found at a more reasonable price. My new CF-74 Semi-rugged laptop with 4 GB RAM cost $1750 on ebay.

It has a touchscreen! It is not a tablet that swivels, but of course other Panasonic models do have that. Using a stylus rather than a mouse or touchpad on a portable device is very nice. The electronic outlets like USB, card slot, and monitor output are well protected by covers. The built in handle is fantastic, and this thing is durable enough that I could beat and assailant while it was running and it probably would not impact performance, though I have not tried. I have not examined thoroughly what technology they have regarding disk drive breaking during device acceleration as the Macbooks have. Nonetheless the hard drives are also said to be well protected. It is highly water resistant and the battery lasts for 5 or 6 hours.

If you are willing to pay a bit extra for a truly well made and useful machine, I recommend buying a CF-74 if you can find it for under $2000.

I do want to mention that there seems to be no support for Linux on this device. Virtualising obviously should be no problem, but it is annoying to be condemned to Windows to be able to utilise all the hardware devices such as touch screen. I will report my results when I really start messing around with it.

A word on Macs: the Macbook pro I used last year with 2 GB runs about $2500. After a year of use, I acknowledge that the OS is nice to have. The capability of Apple, a Unix based very flashy graphical OS to also Parallelise Windows and Linux is impressive, but overall, Macs are just attractive designer products and trendy status symbols. They are not at all worth their price tag when it comes to productivity or usefulness. Anyone hardcore about Unix like my astrophysicist friends runs Linux on a cheaper machine like a Lenovo Thinkpad. Those machines can virtualise Windows or emulate using WINE as needed. My cousin who is a professional film maker does well to have a MacBook pro, but I would not recommend a Mac to anyone outside that field at this point.

Irony

Via Ron Paul:

“The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

-Alan 'Bubbles' Greenspan, 1966

The 'Bubbles' were my addition.

WC Socialism

Anyone who has ever traveled to Amsterdam or a developing country can appreciate a clean city and good sanitation when suddenly it is no longer there. In Amsterdam, and to a lesser extent the rest of Holland, bathroom usage comes at a price varying by establishment. The result of this price means that a large percentage of inhabitants use the city itself as their toilet rather than the costly facilities all around. In Amsterdam, the practice is so widespread that the city wreaks of urine and public outdoor urinals without proper drainage are placed through the city as a patch on a problem seen as impossible to enforce. The United States and many other developed countries by contrast mandate that most establishments which serve food and all gas stations provide free facilities which meet some minimum health standards though results vary. As a result, most places in those countries do not smell of human waste. Sensible Switzerland, on balance the best run country on Earth, provides very clean, well designed, and low-maintenance public toilets complete with drug paraphernalia disposal facilities in many public parks.

Bathroom regulation is a good example of how a minimal and passive government standards on quality and service provision can create tremendous welfare benefits for society as a whole as widespread negative externalities are cheaply eliminated. In general, I prefer a society in which government governs as little as possible and only when the welfare benefits far outweigh the costs to the affected members of society. Though it is vague to say it, freedom itself should be valued at a high price in social welfare calculations in evaluating the merits of a potential new tax, public work project, or regulation. Negative externalities can however quickly outweigh even very high freedom opportunity costs in justifying regulation. There is unquestionably some role for government to grease the wheels of society and preserve social order and wellbeing. After visiting Amsterdam, I did become a bathroom socialist.

Jacque Fresco: Future by Design

Jacques Fresco is an engineer, inventor, futurist and visionary. I believe his name will eventually become commonly known years after his passing. Future By Design (torrent) is a documentary film about the work and ideas of Jacque Fresco. Fresco has a fairly coherent vision for the transition of our civilisation to a prosperous and harmonious Type I civilisation. Mostly this involves education and culturally focusing humanity towards embracing and shaping technology to take care of our living needs, so that we might be free to pursue the higher goals. The DVD currently available on the Venus Project's website contains a book, Designing the Future.

He does not have all the answers nor does he propose that he will make a Utopia. He claims only that his ideas are a far better direction that the one in which we are currently headed. He takes a rational, analytical engineering approach towards designing an economy and infrastructure which automatically satisfies the basic needs of humanity in a sustainable way. A must see.

Ron Paul News Blog

Ron Paul's Campaign has been picking up momentum. Unfortunately he is still way too far behind Guiliani for the moment. That aside, Ron Paul News is a great new blog tracking the best Presidential candidate to come forth in generations.

Incidentally, I have donated 50 USD to Paul's campaign as a small token of my support.

Google Shared Stuff

Google has a new feature, Shared Stuff. My "Shared Stuff" page is linked to on the right of this blog in the Recommended Section. This section will include pages which are not shared in the Google Reader Shared section.

Demonoid, Down Again.

Demonoid, one of the best torrent sites featuring rich content of all sorts has been taken down by its Canadian ISP. A sad day indeed.

*Update* Apparently the info was incorrect. They had a problem in upgrading servers, and this useful resource will return.

*Update 2* Sorry, its really dead this time.

Columbia University hosts Ahmadinejad

Reacting to yesterdays news regarding behaviour unbefitting an elite academic institution, a loyal reader had this to say.

*Update* A good Charlie Rose interview conducted before the Columbia University incident.

The Northwest Passage

In all of recorded history, the Northwest Passage has been blocked by arctic ice making the route unnavigable. It is now open for business, a cause for great concern.

Google Reader Part Deux

In the past few months, I have come to use Google Reader as a source for 95% of my news. Even high frequency sites I have come to accept on the reader as I have better learned to skim the headlines and not read every posting or article. There is now some fracturing of the RSS domain in which some sites give you all the content via the feed so you need not leave the Reader interface, whilst others, usually commercial news outlets, give just a snippet and force you to visit their page to view the entire article. They then can bombard you with adverts, assuming one lacks the appropriate Firefox plugins.

Unfortunately Google Reader can be so useful that it becomes somewhat addicting and time consuming. The more feeds to which one subscribes, the more one feels compelled to read. Technologies are available to distil and repackage customised information from feeds.

Besides the aforementioned sharing ability of the Reader, the Reader finally received a Search box recently which greatly enhances its utility. My shared feed is of course available. I would point to this as the cause of my decline in postings. Many of the things I wish to share with the world speak for themselves in these articles.

Today, on the Companion Page, I have exported and published my current list of RSS feeds. You can import this file directly into your own Reader Account. (More Podcasts to come)

Happy Reading.

Monetary Theory and Policy

Having had some brilliant lecturers in college, particularly in History, I have always wished that those lectures would have been recorded for the world to appreciate. Gradually lectures are making their way onto the Internet. Berkeley seems to be making progress. I just discovered Mark Thoma, author of the quality Economist's View blog has his Monetary Theory and Policy course online through Google Video.

A Suggestion for Microsoft

With the Windows Vista flop, M$ tried to position itself to compete directly with Apple on image alone. Undoubtedly, the Vista eye candy was in impressive display as are the animations of OSX. Having used a MacBook Pro for over a year now, I can tell you that I am less and less impressed by Apple by the day. Perhaps the biggest reason is that virtualised Windows under Parallels seems to run faster and more cleanly than all of the Mac applications. OSX I end up just using as a shell in which I run Windows. Everyone loves to slam Windows, but XP runs stably, quickly, and very easily. Compared to Linux, getting something to run just as you want it in Windows is a real breeze especially for the amateur. This has much to do with market share and demand, but some credit has to be given to good design also.

M$ is now aiming to compete directly with VMWare in the Virtualisation market. A wise move. By the way, VMW is a really good short and I am going to start buying Put options. I did not track the dot com era stocks much at the time, but this is a classic dot com irrational exuberance or simply a misinformed market. Dont get me wrong, they have a great product, but they also have much powerful competition right on their tails (Citrix, M$, Parallels). They are already giving their VMWare Server away for free. How could the market capitalisation then be anywhere near Adobe? Remember you heard it here first.

Back to M$. The one thing I still respect and cannot take away from Apple after all the pretty graphics and sexiness has lost its lustre: it is based on Unix, ie FreeBSD. It is therefore able to run any Linux application with an easy to use front end and the possibility to Virtualise or incorporate M$ products. In other words, it is a computing Superset. This flexibility alone makes having an Apple somewhat justifiable especially for scientists, quantitative researchers, and anyone in Graphics Editing.

M$ could close this gap and take back some market share from Apple by taking a few years to completely rewrite its OS this time with a Unix kernel following Apple's lead. I believe there are intelligent people in Redmond and working for M$ in India and China who still have much to offer humanity be it in OS, personal or industrial intelligent devices, other periferal software, etc. They yet could sell an OS which would be far less the disdain of computer geeks everywhere and which they actually might start to prefer above other Unices (OSX, Ubuntu, Fedora). It would be a bold and risky move to radically change course as I proposed. They should either do this and have hope of long run survival and even leadership, or they can suck out whatever is left from their current OS whilst pursuing something entirely different and dooming themselves to eventual irrelevance, hopefully still returning significant value to stockholders in the meanwhile.

As a closing thought, I used to think like one of those geeks unsatisfied with closed-source models of mediocrity, or perhaps just like an economist opposed to monopolies. However, M$ can no longer be considered a monopoly and their products, closed source though they may be, are much more stable than they used to be. I therefore have for the most part lost my disdain for them.

Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose is probably the best Interviewer I know. His interview technique is calm, respectful, engaging, and empathetic set in a minimalist black set with an unparalleled guest list. The programming used to be pay-only Google Video (besides being broadcast on PBS). Thankfully, that arrangement has terminated. It now seems his content is available freely and rightly so. Valuable video feed.

Brad DeLong Lecture Podcast

My favourite economist, J. Brad DeLong of Berkeley has published on his new Podcast his lectures from this years course American Economic History. The sound quality is unusually good.

Open Media Content

Occasionally on this blog I make strong criticisms of Copyright Law. Given the recent controversy of the BBC iPlayer OS limitation and DRM, I would like to state unequivocally that publicly sponsored media including NPR, PBS, BBC, CBC, ABC, etc, should all be licenced as Creative Commons or similar licence. The distribution of such content should therefore not be distributed with DRM but rather under the most cost effective means to deliver the information to the masses and allow even the "mashup" or editing and redistribution of such content with the appropriate credit and disclaimers. This would also apply to scientific articles supported by publicly funded research. In that case, all research materials including lab notebooks and instrument readouts should be published freely in the public domain excluding information which could violate personal privacy or public (National) security.

Richard Dawkins, Galapagos Lectures

On an eco-tourist cruise to the Galapagos aboard the Santa Cruz, Richard Dawkins delivers several lectures on population genetics and the evolutionary process. Having read several of his books and watched most of his documentaries, I assumed I had just about exhausted his educational potential. This lecture series showed me the fallacy of this assumption. These are some of the best lectures I have heard on the subject, beautifully delivered as always by the eloquent professor. Available at Demonoid. Some lectures available at Google Video.

Irrational Living Practices

Every year, some fairly predictable natural disaster occurs and devastates large areas of land creating human death and misery and property damage. Earthquakes, flooding, and hurricanes come to mind. After the disaster, affected regions usually prey upon the sympathy of others to rebuild their homes and cities through both charity and governmental subsidy. A notable example is the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Army Corps of Engineers was widely blamed for the failure of the levies and the subsequent flooding. 1) The inefficiencies of the legal code to deploy National Guard soldiers without the consent of a State Government combined with 2) the normal inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of government at all levels and 3) a general lack of psychological preparedness for infrequent devastating events resulted finally in an anarchistic, violent scenario of devastation and distress. The reconstruction efforts have basically followed in the same mode despite billions in subsidies and tax cuts.

The critical problem which is politically incorrect to address is who decided it was a good idea to build their house in a flood zone in the first place. In the case of New Orleans, the sad answer was everybody, but especially the poor. Since in economic terms the wealthy had far more to lose, it makes sense that the wealthiest areas of New Orleans were constructed on somewhat more secure ground. It is not fair to say, however, that the risks living below sea level next to one of the world's largest rivers which regularly changes course was properly priced into the housing market. Most people who build their houses in flood zones are either ignorant of the risks, risk loving and possibly irrational, a very high personal discount rate, or a very high preference for living in those areas. Unfortunately psyche of humans, like many pack or herd species, is far more prone to feel secure in a clearly irrational situation so long as everyone else does the same.

A related problem of course is the question of climate change. Far more people are in far greater danger than Katrina owing to probable climate change from human activity. Many major cities are rationally addressing the fallout by considering dikes and other technologies to ensure the cities survive intact. Others are intelligent and ambitious enough to build flood-proof houses.

Whenever possible, avoiding a confrontation with nature is the wisest course of action. Reducing greenhouse emissions and not constructing cheaply in a predictable future disaster area are good rules of thumb. In the event of an inevitable but unfortunate catastrophe, federal governments in all of their fiscal inefficiency ought not be expected to pay.

Death in Iraq

The 20th Century saw unprecedented violence, crimes of war, and deliberate genocide on a scale never before seen. Thanks to George Bush and all those who supported his invasion of Iraq, it seems the 21st Century is starting out in the same tradition. Last year the Lancet published this article from researchers at the John's Hopkins School of Public Health with the following findings:

...data from 1849 households that contained 12 801 individuals in 47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported during the observation period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4·3–7·1), compared with 13·3 per 1000 people per year (10·9–16·1) in the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601 027 (426 369–793 663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

Forgetting that many American soldiers jingoistically volunteered to fight in Iraq, American propaganda outlets regularly report on the number of US soldiers that have been killed in the invasion of Iraq while rarely reporting on cumulative death tolls among Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, the United States accepts less than 100 (figure awaiting confirmation) Iraqi or Afghan refugees every year. The mass genocide and crimes against humanity that have been caused directly or indirectly by the US Government with popular support need to be acknowledged, taught, and remembered alongside the numerous atrocities of the previous century. The politicians complicit in an immoral, illegal, and unjustified invasion including Senators and members of Congress should be tried before an International War Crimes body. The removal of a single tyrranical ruler and his imaginary war machine could have occurred with a single bullet or missile. The neoconservative experiment to impose a peaceful democratic system of government on an unwilling people by force and at great expense in money and lives has failed utterly as any informed and thinking person could have predicted. Never again.

Urban Liveability

Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked world cities by liveability. Unsurprisingly, Canadian, Australian, and Swiss cities rank highest.

Suprnova

The legendary torrent site Suprnova, down for several years, has been resurrected with the help of the PirateBay. Warning: Users of such public torrent sites in areas vulnerable to copyright enforcement tend to be more exposed to monitoring and legal threat. Private sites like Demonoid, BitMe, BitMeTV, and UKNova tend to be safer because of their requirements for upload ratios and their exclusivity.

More Screens

Most people still use one monitor 17-19 inches for their computing display needs. Quality large screen monitors with good resolution such as the Apple 2560x1600 Cinema display still run an unreasonable 1800 USD. A good solution to increase productivity and ease of use is to add 200 USD 19 inch flat monitors to your display. Going from 1 to 2 monitors yields a vast improvement. My workstation consists of a 8 x 19 inch monitor grid powered by 2 x NVIDIA Quadro NVS graphics cards physically supported by 2 x Ergotron DS 100 Quad monitor desk stands for a combined 10.4 million pixel display for around 2700 USD, or 3800 px/USD. Considering the Cinema displays run at 2275 px/USD, my setup, though somewhat excessive, provides good bang per buck.

When using several monitors in Windows, the programme Utramon (torrents) is an indispensable addition. It extends the task bar to every monitor and adds several other simple but effective multiple monitor utilities.

Cosmic Variance

Cosmic Variance is a highly regarded web log for those with a particular interest in Astronomy and Physics but do not necessarily hold graduate degrees. It is authored by seven different contributors, experts in their field.

Blog Recommendation: Charles Kenny

Charles Kenny has a blog about Development and Welfare Economics.

Scitalks

Scitalks is a Web video site which links to interesting scientifically relevant material.

(Unfortunately much of the content is in RealPlayer or streaming Windows Media format)

Virgin America Inaugural Flight

For too long, American air travel has been dominated by behemoth, union-dominated, subsidised monsters which offer generally poor service all around including flight attendance. Even State airlines from socialist countries are consistently better. Virgin America gives great hope to the future of domestic airline travel in the United States in terms of both quality and competition. The San Francisco based airline has taken its inaugural flight as documented by Engaget.

gPhone

Rumours abound regarding the development of a Google Phone. Certainly it makes a great deal of sense in light of their continued development of applications for mobile devices as well as their recent bid commitment for 700 MHz spectrum with the caveat of open access for mobile devices. A new rumour suggests the Google phone could be built upon the Open Source Linux openMoko phone currently under development and due to be released this fall. The openMoko has all the potential in itself to be a dominant device or at least force other commercial phones (ie iPhone) to open themselves up more (VoIP, etc). Creating an open source, add-driven phone would probably be the wisest business decision for Google and surely would highlight everything that is good about the company.

Heroin

From The Insider - Heroin on the NHS (torrent):

15 years ago the Swiss had one of the highest rates of drug addiction and AIDS in Europe. They decided to radically change their drug laws. To combat the spread of the disease 6000 clean needles were dispensed every day in the Zurich park. In this safe zone, addicts could shoot up openly. Shocked by the thousands of addicts who came forward, the government swiftly took control of the illegal market. They stopped criminalising heroin and made it a medical issue instead. Clinics were set up where addicts, now patients, were given as much heroin as they needed. The results have been astonishing. Drug crime and deaths have gone down dramatically, and addiction has gone down by 90%. Prescribing heroin has almost eradicated the Swiss drug problem. Addicts can now lead normal lives and because heroin is no longer seen as cool and rebellious, far fewer young people are drawn to it in the first place.

Criminalising drug use is a formula for social disaster be it alcohol or even heroin. Drug regulation through taxation, registration, or controlled usage may be beneficial to a society, but the focus of any law should be in maximising the welfare of everyone affected. At the end of the day, what a person does with their own body is their business so long as others are not negatively impacted.

Heroin by the Velvet Underground.

Missile Defence

Under the Bush administration, in 2002 the United States withdrew from the anti-Ballistic Missle Treaty and began to pursue an ABM system. According to a Congressional Budget Report, the total estimated expense of the system by 2024 could be as high as 247 billion USD. In the Cold War, an ABM system would have been quite an advantage given the Nuclear Missile Technology of the 20th Century. I put forward the idea that if a legitimately recognised Nation State possessing nuclear weapons did wish to deliver them to a target, 21st Century technology including unmanned subs and UAVs will make the delivery of such devices far easier to deliver than launching a Ballistic Missile. Even using 3000 year old technology such as shipping the nuclear device covertly in a standard shipping container would have a high probability of success. Subverting an advanced technology is always much cheaper than the technology's development.

A regular criticism of the US military is that they are constantly fighting the previous war rather than looking ahead. The money spent on Missile Defence will be completely wasted. The United States in developing this technology continues to alienate its allies, a cost which is high but difficult to quantify. Imagine if instead the $247 billion were either never spent at all or rather spent on basic scientific research grants or technological competition such as the DARPA Challenge.

Wii

Yesterday I played Wii for the first time. The game was Mario Strikers Charged, which should be called Mario Football. A motion sensitive vibrating pointing wand adds a completely new dimension to human-machine interaction. It reminds me of the leap from keyboard to mouse. In itself, it is just a toy, but one which demonstrates the advanced creativity and ingenuity of the Japanese and foreshadows future technology interfaces.

Mormons

PBS recently produced a 4 hour documenatary series about the Mormons (torrents). An accurate and fairly respectful work, it does gloss over some of the stranger sides of Mormon theology. Mormonism is in many respects an American Muslim styled religion although this parallel is completely ignored by the documentary and probably most Mormons themselves. South Park had a very good episode "All About the Mormons" from Season 7. Given that Mormons now even have a US Presidential candidate, they are worth understanding.

Atom

The new BBC 4 documentary, Atom, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili, is one of the best documentary series I have seen this year. It focuses on the development of the modern theory of the atom and quantum physics. Available on the usual torrent networks.

NASA

Thanks to one of Bush's brilliant ideas, NASA's budget is now mostly wasted in M2M (the human Mission to Mars) and the rest on the shuttle and ISS. A recent NPR interview put the orginisation further in question. Michael Griffin, director of NASA, doubted whether we would not all be better off under global warming and therefore should not prioritise its abatement.

With regards to the manned Space programme, NASA has recently experienced an astronaut bizarre love triangle and now allegations of drunken flight and systems sabotage. If NASA is to exist, which I believe it no longer should, its beneficial role should be to fund Earth Science, Astronomy, Aerospace Engineering, and general technology research in the public interest.

The Mars Rover and the Galileo and Cassini missions are examples of the incredible benefits that can come from a serious scientifically driven Space agency. The scientific value for those programmes has vastly exceeded the costs because they had the right idea: robotic exploration of outer space. Humans were not designed to live in space and so far the cost of such adventures is no were close to the benefits. Let human space exploration take place commercially as Richard Branson and Burt Rutan are demonstrating. Let scientists do their jobs correctly, and stop distorting their mission and their budgets with a child's fantasy. If children want to go into space, let them finance it themselves.

Linux, Peu à Peu

I mentioned before that given my disgust with M$ Vista, all future PCs I run would be Linux with a virtualised Windows Server 2003 Enterprise session. Despite my flirtations with Linux, Windows frankly works for every application I need personally or professionally and I cannot use Linux just as I cannot use OS X perpetually without a Parallels Windows session running inside. Do not get me wrong; I want to see Open Source Linux come to dominate computer operating systems, but in the short run it can only attract users by doing absolutely everything a normal Windows PC can do with the same level of convenience and full compatibility. Even some of the most enthusiastic Linux geeks I know have found themselves getting sucked back into Windows.

I have recommended Parallels especially for Mac users given the coherence feature. VMWare has some other advantages like hosting and remote connection as well as mountable bootable partitions rather than strictly virtual hard drives. VMWare Server is now free!

Finally, I have made this change for my personal PC which is set to Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn 32 bit natively with VMWare running WinXP32. Using this guide it was fairly straightforward as far as Linux installs go. Unfortunately for enterprise level 64 bit computing, the free VMWare Server does not yet cut the mustard. You need the multi-k$ version for that apparently. Peu à peu, we will be always running Linux. I am now doing it, and so can you.

Robert Hanson on Intellectual Property

Robert Hanson, GWT developer and author of the well regarded guide GWT in Action, has a great new post on his blog. He shares the practical viewpoint with the rest of the rational and uncorrupted world that piracy is generally a good and inevitable phenomenon and that Open Source is generally the best model to develop software not just in the aggregate, but also for specific customers. He rightly chastises those who follow the closed-source model of development. Furthermore this post explains the usefulness to Java developers of the JAD Eclipse plugin. Since Hanson praises piracy, it is worth noting that his book is available on several torrent networks.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul, a staunch libertarian, recently interviewed at Google as part of his campaign for the Presidency of the US - a must see. Many of his espoused positions such as supporting the gold and silver standards for public currency seem impractical or irrelevant, yet they are based upon sound legal foundation, ie the US Constitution. He is a candidate who is easy to distort, yet his solid character, sound principles, and political idealism are undeniable.

It is clear that the letter of the law set out by the Constitution has gradually been eroded and perverted by activist judicial decisions, misguided lawmakers, and tyrannical Presidents. Rather than a politically isolationist Republic of free citizens, the United States has become a fascist empire, able to invade, occupy, or completely eliminate other nations in blitzkrieg at the whim of a single individual. While most other current presidential candidates have supported these illegal and immoral policies, or at least in principle would use such illegal power under certain circumstances, Ron Paul is one of the few who has always in principle and practice been opposed (eg the Conquest of Iraq).

Through the "War on Drugs," a war against its own populace, their property, and freedom itself, the United States Government manifestly defecates upon the Enlightenment principles upon which it was founded and the cannabis paper upon which it was written. Any convoluted judicial argument for the legality of such policies should have long ago resulted in the prompt impeachment of any supporting justices and the arrest of any enforcing agents. By continuing to prosecute this crime against humanity, the US Government has undermined its own legitimacy.

As directed in the Constitution, Ron Paul supports States' rights in legislating or enforcing powers not guaranteed to the federal government in the Constitution.

On the Colbert Report where I was exposed to Paul, he supported the elimination of almost every federal agency and administration including United Nations agencies. In the interview, he comes off as somewhat of an extremist, yet in fact he is perhaps one of the few sane, thinking, and principled. I have little doubt that if given a proper chance, most of the World would gladly welcome a man such as this to take over the Presidency.

I realise that that the ideas asserted in this post probably do more to paint both Paul and myself as extremists than anything else, but I encourage readers to watch the Google interview and decide for themselves what the best course would be for the United States to follow.

Love and Castration

I have always found it bizarre that people profess their love for their pets, treating them in many respects better than fellow humans, yet castrate these beloved animals as a matter of course. In my view, castration is a vile mutilation and an extreme violation of a creature's dignity. An animal that requires castration for the purposes of taming perhaps should not be kept as a pet in the first place. Clearly there is a need to control population. Less invasive and potentially reversible measures such as vasectomies are more humane but rarely used alternatives.

Once again, technology comes to our rescue, allowing us to be more civilised. A new drug has been released in Australia which limits both sperm and testosterone production for several months thus fulfilling the targeted aspects of castration whilst preserving dignity and reversibility. There is an argument to be made for administering this to some people.

Photosynth

Microsoft has an impressive 3D photo viewing and analysis software, Photosynth, currently under development. A presentation from TED2007. Via Crooked Timber.

Portable Phones

From Freakonomics:

David Pogue of the New York Times points out that, in the midst of last week’s iPhone mania, most of us missed T-Mobile’s announcement of an innovative new system in which, under a certain plan, all calls made within range of a Wi-Fi wireless network are free.

The new T-Mobile cellular/VoIP WiFi crossover is the real smart-phone feature consumers should be demanding. The iPhone could have this capacity through a software upgrade, and only in implementing this feature along with opening up to other carriers, greater plan flexibility, and faster data networks would their elegantly designed product be truly compelling. Until then, I am holding out.

Hardware Recommendation: Addonics Diamond

The Addonics Diamond hard drive kit offers the highest quality external enclosure available for SATA drives. An optional 5.25" 'Mobile Rack' component allows the enclosure to slide seamlessly into a tower or server even as part of a hot-swappable RAID. As stated on their website, this drive kit makes any SATA drive into a portable data store. The kit works modularly to allow for USB, SATA, eSATA, IDE, or SCSI connexion. Given the quality construction and impressive flexibility, the Addonics Diamond kit is well worth the price.

The Least Among Us

Niall Ferguson, a history author, journalist, and Harvard professor, has a well written review of three new books on African Development politics and economics. I will add them to the list of things to read. Eliminating disease and poverty are the two biggest moral imperatives for the developed world. Nowhere are those problems more dire than sub-Saharan Africa.

Google Reader

I have long been an avid user of the Google Personalised Page, iGoogle as mentioned frequently. I have loaded it up with scores of RSS feeds and spend too much time on it. I have known for a while about Google Reader, but never preferred it over iGoogle. Recently though I have been converted, at least for blogs and magazines that update less than five posts per day. High frequency news sites such as the NY Times are better on iGoogle since they clutter the Reader. One of the nice features of Google Reader is the Shared Items which has been posted as a Gadget on the right side of this blog. It has its own syndication too.

*Update* Google Operating System also informs us of a powerful feature of Google Reader to reconstruct feed history not even available on the original site.

Gawking at Google Maps

I am absolutely blown away by the new dynamic route adjustment feature of Google Maps. This is years ahead of what I would have expected.

GWT

As announced in November, I have spent significant time this year programming fairly advanced webpages using the Google Web Toolkit. The toolkit was released spring of 2006. It features not a Java wrapper for Javascript as previously stated, but rather a full compiler which translates Java code resembling the Swing graphical interface package to pure Javascript. Google currently uses the toolkit to make services such as Google Groups and Picasa Web Albums although some of their most sophisticated services such as Gmail, iGoogle, and Docs and Spreadsheets still relies on low level Javascript.

I Cringely recently predicted that Javascript toolkits, especially GWT, would become the standard not just for web development, but especially and more immediately for applications designed to run securely on mobile devices such as the iPhone. Apple's recent move to open Safari to Windows (especially in a very broken condition) was a well thought out strategic move to encourage Javascript programmers to begin supporting Apple's proprietary web browser. The GWT connection comes from the fact that Google has put significant effort in ensuring that GWT compiled JS functions on all major browsers since most browsers process JS differently and often fail as a result. At the same time, Google is making concessions to Apple in making YouTube videos available in Apple format.

Let me pause and say that for all of its impressive strengths, Apple's critical weakness comes from its obsession with its own closed platforms and formats.

Back to GWT. I am honoured that the GWT news site, onGWT has on my recommendation posted the link to the Cringely article. onGWT is the best site available for the latest news and resources for GWT.

Blog Recommendation: Future Pundit

Future Pundit (RSS) is in many regards what I wish my blog were. He has an informed perspective on current world developments and understands their implications for the future of technology. Previous generations did not have the luxury of understanding the laws of physics and knowing what technologies would be possible in the future. Today, the physical laws are understood well enough to predict the general range of human technology for several millenia. In my opinion, a great deal more human discussion must focus on the future. Unfortunately, with a world all too focused on petty squables over land, primitive energy resources, and backwards religious belief, we loose sight of the larger picture to the detriment of the emerging future world.

More on Pigovian Taxes

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics has a great post in favour of further petroleum taxes. Interestingly, he argues that carbon taxation to prevent global warming is less important than reducing congestion and traffic accidents for social welfare. I suspect that he is not properly factoring in the globally felt negative externalities of global warming, but his conclusion is nonetheless correct that at least a tax of USD 1.00 on petroleum is dearly needed.

The most economically efficient solution to the issue of congestion, ie a proper Pigovian tax, would be a system like London's centre where only those vehicles which have paid a daily fee may enter. Their system relies on sophisticated network of cameras and plate recognition software to automatically bill and fine drivers.

Traffic accidents are doubtless a problem which should be seriously considered. I would expect that insurance and lawsuits already captures those externalities, but I do think a tax on vehicle size and weight per mile driven would help to counter the runaway arms race of personal safety that exists in vehicle addicted nations. I am mostly referring to the exorbitant demand for SUVs particularly for women. The individual driver, surrounded by an armada of SUVs piloted by cellphone distracted drivers, is not inclined to purchase a Volkswagon Golf. Thus the rational individual, in the interests of self preservation, chooses to join the backwards collective. This lesson I learned quite vividly on my first visit to Texas.

Nonetheless, a gasoline tax would as Levitt suggests have a beneficial effect on many things including congestion, traffic accidents, climate change and obeisity.

Petroleum and Obeisity

In the United States, a morbidly obese country, rising fuel prices will have a very positive effect on public health. Sustained high energy prices should accelerate the effect owing to increased investment in public transit and more rationally designed cities.

Film Review: Sicko

The propagandist Michael Moore, perhaps partly responsible for the Bush reelection, has produced a new film. Google's ratings suggest it is being received extremely well. Like all of his work, Sicko appeals much more to emotion than to reason. In seducing the American populace with the conveniences of socialism, he completely whitewashes the costs paid in high taxation, lower economic growth, high unemployment, and reduced technological advancement. Perhaps this is why country after country in Europe has been electing conservative governments; they have learnt the lessons of socialism the hard way. I agree that for poor, unproductive, and unambitious people such as those featured in Sicko, socialism is an absolutely fantastic deal. Goods and services are provided at someone else's expense. Michael Moore would lead one to believe that it is the greed of megacorporations who are responsible for all human suffering in the United States. The problem of unaffordable health care in the United States does not come from competing insurance companies. It is a problem of monopoly.

The American Medical Association, the State union of doctors, maintains medical school quotas and strictly suppresses the licencing of foreign trained doctors. This medical monopoly also maintains the sole ability to prescribe medication. Prescription fraud such as trying to fill a prescription in a higher amount than ordered by a doctor, is a felony punishable by prison sentencing. Doctors tend to prescribe medicines in artificially low quantity so as to encourage more overpriced visits for a refill. On top of this the medicine which is prescribed is sold at a large premium because of the lack of regulation in drug pricing as well as the overprotective intellectual property inherent in the American patent system.

Medical expenses are further inflated by the inordinate costs of doing business. Malpractice insurance is extremely expensive. There is no upper limit to the damages in a medical malpractice suit. Merck was famously ordered to pay USD 253 million for the death of one marathon runner. With 33% cuts, over-educated and overpaid lawyers are all too happy to help recover alleged damages. Lawyers such as John Edwards make fortunes preying upon the misfortunes of others.

There are of course some delightfully positive aspects of the US system. With the supply of doctors kept artificially small, the competition to be one of those doctors is increased so that American doctors, after they have been paid, are some of the best in the world. Maltreated patients do have the recourse to sue. Overprotected intellectual property drives innovation in medicine saving countless lives and improving quality of life in the long term. With drug price regulation in most other countries, America effectively subsidises medicine for the rest of the World.

Unfortunately, Michael Moore does not address any of these real issues. He is long on sob stories and short on understanding. American medicine is no doubt expensive and long overdue for anti-trust and tort reform, but calls for a medical socialist revolution are entirely inappropriate.

Weather

It took me a while to find a decent website for weather. Weather.com is owned by the weather channel and is mostly spam from what I can see. Sadly, this is where I would often go when I needed some weather information. Intellicast.com on the other hand is a great site. No advertising, global content, and readily-accessible multifactor weather forecasts. If you know of some other good weather sites, by all means share with the group.

Another Successful SCRAM Jet Test

SCRAM Jet engines offer the potential for up to Mach 15 atmospheric flight. At these speeds, one could fly from Ney York to Syndey in under 2 hours. Satellites could also be launched into orbit much more cheaply with a SCRAM jet than with rockets alone since rockets must carry their oxidiser. Unlike traditional jet engines, SCRAM jets have no moving parts and rely on air compression alone to ignite fuel at very high speeds.

While wind tunnel experiments have shown the potential of SCRAM jets for many years, expensive field tests have been rare but promising. Reuters reports that another successful field test has been carried out over the Australian outback. The experiment results from the collaboration of the Austrialian Defence Science and Technology Organisation and the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA, the original creator of the Internet, is one of the few truly profitable and effective components of the United States military.

*Update* I have been informed by an esteemed SCRAM Jet research engineer at Cal Tech that depending on fuel, the theoretical maximum speed could be as high as M 25.

N-tuplets

Humanity has long been plagued with the very difficult task of bearing and birthing children. It is one of the most dangerous periods of life for both mother and child. Complications from this ordeal more often than not resulted in mortality. Today, modern medical science has drastically reduced the probability of death from such complications and has even given fertility hope to many couples who would have been doomed by their own biology never to produce viable offspring. Unfortunately, the innate drive to reproduce has caused many couples to push their own biology to the limit of medical science in trying to produce offspring. Once impregnated through a cocktail of drugs, hormones and possibly invasive procedures sometimes involving third parties as donors or hosts, couples will then decide to try to simultaneously bring multiple babies to term even as many as 7 at a time. If this is not a crime against those children and a crime against nature then I do not know what is. The children tend to be born prematurely and are at extreme risk through their entire development process. The most bizarre part is that these couples will not terminate some of the pregnancies for the good of the rest because of their religious hang-ups. I can appreciate an anti-abortionist position, but for a woman to undergo such unnatural and dangerous procedures and then claim a profound respect for the dignity of human life is well beyond my comprehension.

When technology is sufficiently advanced, one can more seriously consider a Brave New World in which children are grown by the hundreds in artificial wombs. In such a scenario, there would presumably be little danger to the child's safety or development. A person could then spawn as many genetically similar children as they had desire and means to support.

Here on early 21st Century Earth, upright, large brained humans cannot reproduce in litters. Reproductive technologies are very fresh and need not be used lightly to satisfy some perverted fantasy or primitive impulse. There are literally millions of unwanted or orphaned children around the world. Infertile parents should consider adoption. I propose that carrying greater than 3 unnaturally conceived children simultaneously to term should be criminally prosecuted or prohibitively taxed. Society might also consider removing the children from those households since clearly such parents are unfit.

Google Maps

I am frequently puzzled when I hear of people who still use MapQuest. MapQuest was indeed useful in the late '90s during the Dot Com era. Today Google Maps is the way to go. They recently rolled out a new feature, Street View.

Surface Computing

Popular Mechanics has an impressive demonstration of new human-computer interaction technology being developed with Microsoft.

Green Energy Technology

Last Friday, on NPR Science Friday, two developers of clean energy technology were interviewed.

Klaus Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, presented technology which could relatively cheaply sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere. His breakthrough was not so much in the basic principle, but in significantly reducing the cost. He believes that very soon the CO2 from a litre of petroleum could be sequestered for merely an additional USD 0.07 per litre. Emissions could be sequestered into sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) or calcium carbonate (chalk, antacid).

Meanwhile, Jerry Woodall a very accomplished inventor at Perdue University has developed a simple means of using aluminum, gallium, and water to generate hydrogen. His proposed aluminum cycle could be a very useful way to allow hydrogen fuel portability at about 40% energy efficiency. The hydrogen could then be used in fuel cells or if necessary, combusted.

Today from New Scientist: University of Utah scientists have developed a means of recovering waste heat energy through an acoustic heat engine which converts heat to sound to electricity also at about 40% efficiency. One cubic centimetre of these small devices could recover about 1 W of power.

Andrew Sullivan

Notes from the Underground is back with an excellent review of Andrew Sullivan's new book. While I have always admired Sullivan's intellect, eloquence and 'eclectic' background, I lost most respect for him when I saw him transition from classical conservative thinker to Neoconservative attack dog. He became in my mind one of the most pernicious types of people alive today akin to wartime National Socialist supporters, and his reverence for the (divine) Lincoln makes him even more suspect. Nonetheless, he is yet worthy of some attention. His blog is the Daily Dish.

Another Reason Not to Smoke

If you are still a tobacco smoker, you may wish to take note of a new study out of Hellas, the country where tobacco consumption AVERAGES one pack per day per person making it the highest per capita. Tobacco absorbs large quantities of radionuclides making the deadly smoke not just chemically harmful, but also radioactive.

Google Compound Gadget

My readers will know how useful I find the Google Personalised Page which has been poorly renamed iGoogle. A Compound Gadget has been released which is very useful for decluttering the personalised page into tabbed gadgets. I will soon be reposting all the RSS and XML feeds to which I link on my own personalised page.

The Mandelbrot Set

Fractals - The Colours of Infinity is an excellent documentary on fractal geometry with particular regard to the Mandelbrot Set which is generated by iterating: fc(z) <-> z^2 + c. More can be learned from Wikipedia. The afore linked documentary is narrated by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. It features colour cycling of the Mandelbrot Set which result in stunningly beautiful visualisations of the infinite complexity and repetitive order inherent to this particular fractal at any magnification. Indeed, one begins to appreciate that the geometry of the natural world is seemingly a special case of fractal geometry.

Politics and US Healthcare

As I have mentioned before, the biggest flaw I see in the current US system is the problem of the limited supply from the American Medical Association doctor's labour union. This aside, I would like to draw attention to Brad DeLong's FT opinion article endorsing Barak Obama's proposed healthcare "solution." Obama should be applauded for having the courage to announce such a detailed proposal which exposes him to political attacks.

DNA Discoverer has Personal Genome Sequenced

Nobel laureate James Waston, together with Francis Crick, discovered the double helix structure of DNA along with the mechanism by which it is the medium for Genetic information. The entire human genome was sequenced only 4 years ago as a large collaborative effort costing USD 3 billion over 13 years. Gene sequencing technology, like computing is advancing exponentially such that in 60 days Watson's genome was sequenced for under USD 1 million. A genome's information will fit on a single DVD.

Watson is an active proponent of human genetic engineering, what could be termed "eugenics." While many support the idea of genetic therapy to cure or prevent disease, Watson goes farther, supporting genetic engineering even for cosmetic purposes. This issue will more and more come to the forefront of public policy and debate, hopefully even overshadowing the Anna Nicole Smith's baby daddy controversy or Paris Hilton's jail sentencing. I fully support reproductive freedom with the limits that parents are taxed for bringing new people into the world (perhaps progressively) and parents and doctors punished if their genetic or fertility experiments result in undue or unnatural human suffering. The unfortunate result of this may be that the human genome experiences fads where some celebrity's genes become very quickly overrepresented in the population, but overall I expect people will wish to preserve large sections of their own genome in the next generation while tweaking out negative carcinogenic genes and aiming for healthy life extension in the next generation. Meanwhile the cult of the "organic" will come to encompass the human population where a natural and more diseased segment of the population will remain reproductively exclusive. If I had the choice and the technology were sufficiently developed so as to be well understood and extremely reliable, my offspring would probably not be organic. To quote Watson, "If every girl were beautiful, I think it would be great!"

Personal genome sequencing has more immediate implications for health care, preventative medicine, insurance, and medical economics, but that is a topic for another time.

Global Peace Index

The Economist Intelligence Unit together with several other think tanks has compiled a Global Peace Index by country. Norway ranks first, while the United States ranks 96th and its protectorates Israel and Iraq rank 119 and 121 respectively filling the bottom tier. BBC article.

Mathematica 6.0

Mathematica, the child of Stephen Wolfram, is a Kernel and a Development package and a symbolic language for mathematical evaluation and manipulation. Beyond its core functionality, Mathematica has a vast function library which allows it to be tied in or to glue together many other platforms and languages including Matlab, C++, Python, Java and .Net. A skilled Mathematica programmer can develop extremely complex and sophisticated programmes with ease. Unfortunately, being a closed source platform which retails for around 2000 USD per copy, it remains a niche product for academics and some quantitative professionals. Mathematica 6.0 was recently released as announced by /. I have had the pleasure to use Mma 6.0 and I have been extremely impressed with the the upgrade. Improvements include text coloration for different language types which makes reading the code far easier as well as the new Dynamic evaluation function which allows for greater flexibility in realtime evaluation and animation. Since Mma relies only on a serial number for activation and every previous version of Mathematica was easily cracked, I assume Mathematica 6.0 will soon become common in underground circles.

Economic Thinking vs. Evolutionary Thinking

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources in the production and consumption of goods and services. Mankind has finally entered a stage where the economy tends to increase at a positive rate owing to scientific understanding and the mastery of the physical world through technology. If humanity survives past its current critical phase (Type 0), the economic expansion will likely continue until the energy of the nearby galaxies has been exhausted and the Universe gradually begins to die a particle death.

During large periods of human evolution such was not the case. Resources and technology were stagnant. One person's average gain was another's average loss. Accepting immigrants into the community or yielding resources to a nearby tribe could have been an existential threat to a population's genetic prevalence. Thus humans have evolved with an inherent suspicion of outsiders and reluctance to trade with them. It works well as an evolutionary survival strategy on the African forest or Savannah, but is a very poor strategy for expanding wealth and resources in a positive-sum, technologically advancing civilisation. Without education to overcome the protectionist genetic instincts of primitive man or similar memetic cultural exclusivity, politics and laws end up restricting trade and immigration in very unproductive and uncooperative ways to the detriment of everyone.

Paul Rubin has written a very interesting piece about this. Via Mankiw.