Monkey speek

Monkey chatter smacks of human speech, researcher says
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-me-sci-sn-talking-monkeys-20130408,0,3583780.story

It makes a lot of sense to me that speech evolved gradually and that we would be able to find more primitive versions all around. One of the major conundrums surrounding the evolution of birds was ‘how the hell did they ever evolve flight feathers’? Well recent research seems to have rather conclusively concluded that the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct after all, we are surrounded by them: birds. Early bipedal dinosaurs were probably covered with feathers from birth and likely relied on garish displays to woo mates. It is quite plausible that, much like peacocks today, feathers that are now used for flight were initially used to impress members of the opposite sex and only ‘accidentally’ used for flight. I suspect, then, that the vocalizations mentioned in the article are indeed speech, just speech that is more primitive by virtue of being able to make fewer variations, thus a smaller vocabulary. Indeed, if the face is a strong part of primate conversation we wouldn’t even know it by listening to them. Certainly amongst humans more information is conveyed through body language and facial changes, so much so that people had to invent ’emoticons’ to convey the same information in test ;-). I suspect that if we as a species weren’t so stuck on ourselves we might realize that animals have rich language skills and we are just dummies for not knowing it. Perhaps that is why the Neanderthals did so well for so long.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/technology/security/shodan/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

I touched this a bit earlier, but it is worth bringing up again. We, as a society, are running around with our pants down around our ankles and are not even aware of the breeze. This database has been done more or less by a guy goofing off, any serious bad guy has done the same thing in a week with access to any number of bot nets that can be rented (or trivially manufactured). The sorts of scans that are necessary to collect this information are so ubiquitous that it is not worth even logging the attempts to try to establish a pattern. If you are out of reasons to lie awake at night, shivering in terror, this one should jump right to the top.

Medical squeeze not just for patients

Doctors driven to bankruptcy
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/smallbusiness/doctors-bankruptcy/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

There is an uncomfortable element with any change in paradigm (for better or worse). In order for there to be any winners, there always have to be losers. Sometimes the losers just have some bad luck, sometimes they were just barely suited for the old paradigm and just couldn’t cut it when things change. Like I said earlier, if our society cuts health care costs by 30% that means someone has to eat $750 billion dollars. That undoubtedly means lots and lots of stories just like the ones in the article above. Unfortunately, I don’t think these stories had any relation to any _improvement_ in our overall situation, rather the opposite.

Lesterland

Why Washington is corrupt
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/07/opinion/lessig-washington-corruption/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

I thought my reader(s) might find this amusing. To me it is an effective way of summarizing why our government is the way it is (focused on the care and feeding of the oligarchy). I doubt any reform such as outlined by the author is feasible (because it is anti-oligarchy), but it is a pleasant fantasy to think that such a relatively trivial change could lead to such a dramatic shift in how our government works.

Human cyborg, relations

Knowledge is Health
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/knowledge_is_health/

This is an interesting article, but what struck me was the idea that we (as a society) have already become cyborgs (the melding of machine and man), what with our dependence on smart phones and all. His idea that something like Google Glasses will help steer us to a healthier lifestyle is quite interesting. As my wife and I went for a short walk today (which, while enjoyable, was probably a dumb idea given my illness) I sort of riffed on this idea talking about the lab-on-a-chip idea (of which my DNA sequencing chip is but a version) as well as the breath analyzer idea. Your smart phone could frequently analyze your physical (and really, why not emotional/psychic as well?), communicate with the great diagnostician in the sky and either preempt any illnesses all together or quickly treat them long before they became chronic.

So we are already cyborgs, it is just refinements from here on out…

Quite ammmmuuuuzzzing…

I’ve been sick the past few days. I think I got my boy’s bronchitis (that is not supposed to be contagious) and am hacking up a storm. Been watching lots of ‘tube, but nothing that prompted me to blog until I read the comics today and found this gem:

Dustin comic

More amusing to me because ‘lather, rinse and repeat’ is used as an example of a bad algorithm in computer science (no way to know when to exit the loop). Anyway, figured I might show a bit of life for my reader(s).

BTW, I saw something on SpaceX on the ‘tube and was interested to note that their heavy lift vehicle, Falcon Heavy, could lift more than the shuttle (up to 58 tons) and that the launch cost was somewhat less astronomical $6,500/lb to a geosynchronous transfer orbit (I would assume the price is less for LEO). Still quite crazy, no doubt, but if I had that sort of money I might be tempted to toss up a space station or twain for my own experiments.

Breath test for a heart attack?

Heart Failure: Is There a Breath Test?
http://www.medpagetoday.com/CriticalCare/CHF/38076

It seems I haven’t talked about this before, but there is a lot of very interesting science that is under development that allows for the potential of some rather incredible medical information simply from a few deep breaths. Sort of the same concept as the alcohol breathalyzer, anything that is volatile at body temps will move from your blood stream to your lungs and from thence to you breath. It turns out that lots of medical conditions are presaged by these volatile compounds and an accurate and sensitive method of detecting these things can go a very long way toward early (and accurate) diagnosis of a whole host of diseases. Maybe the Star Trek tricorder is a hand-held breathalyzer?

Alternatives, if they could be made to work

Aluminum-Air Battery to Power EVs for 1000 Miles
http://news.discovery.com/autos/fuel-and-alternative-fuel-technologies/aluminum-air-battery-1000-miles-130325.htm

The first time I saw an article like this (over a decade ago) I probably spent a week reading up on alternative energy storage mechanisms, there are dozens that are realistic and dozens more that seem quite plausible. Why can’t they compete? Well, it boils down to the mainstream products being cheaper, what with their installed infrastructure and substitution costs. Some of these ideas might very well have become the mainstream in some alternative universe if they were invented first (it costs _billions_ of dollars to build a deep sea oil rig, with ZERO guarantee that you will ever get your money back! what is the chance of that happening if an alternative history had not seen value in crude oil?). The aluminum battery makes a great deal of sense, but it too is nothing more than an energy storage device (so is crude oil, but the energy was stored over millions of years, millions of years ago (crude oil is still being created, just at a fraction of the rate we are using it)). Only nuclear is really an energy creation device, though one could make a philosophical argument that it is energy left over from the big bang. Anyway, my point is any alternative today has to compete with the massive (likely, in aggregate, greater than several hundred trillion dollars) infrastructure in place for dealing with crude oil, coal, natural gas, etc. This is one of the primary reasons I have focused my attention on alternatives that neatly mesh with existing infrastructure, the conversion cost is many orders of magnitude lower (indeed, in the case of oil from duckweed/algae, there is almost no conversion cost, though there is the wee little issue of no one has made it economical (yet?)). The upside for aluminum ‘batteries’ is there is an aluminum refining industry already in place. The down side is ‘gas’ stations would all need to be changed at a cost of trillions just here in the US. You can get that sort of investment (Wall Street moves trillions around every day) if everyone involved stands to make a buck, but that means there must be high margins to make it worth while.

Once crude oil gets over a few thousand dollars a barrel some of these alternatives will finally start to have the profit in them to get people to switch. Which one ‘wins’ is probably hard to predict. I think crude oil won out in its day because initially it was basically free since the stuff just oozed out of the ground.