Well, Duh!

The Internet is a surveillance state
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

I kinda doubt this is news to any of my reader(s), but there is no privacy any more. Even if you want to live in a shack in the wilderness like the Unibomber that information is in a searchable database somewhere and while you might not have as detailed a profile as I do, if you want to travel you are going to have to leave digital foot prints (unless you are really just walking about, in which case your ability to travel is quite restricted). How spies, etc. get about is by creating what appear to be legitimate digital backgrounds; they are, in fact, part of the system. I think it would be easier today to create a fabricated identity, but it would require immense self control to never mix up your different identities and provide a path to connect them. Once anyone is under a microscope there is very little that can remain hidden for long.

And all this is legal!

DSM-V

Are we over-diagnosing mental illness?
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/16/health/mental-illness-overdiagnosis/index.html?hpt=hp_bn13

‘Normal’ is continually redefined by society. However, society’s mental illness is now being defined by for-profit organizations who stand to make billions of dollars by having ‘normal’ defined in such a way that the vast majority of people now ‘must’ take prescription (and generally on-patent) drugs just to ‘be normal’. This article is nice in that it gives a bit of an overview. There are certainly conditions that have increasing evidence that indicate they are likely to benefit by being in the DSM manual, but there are also quite a few conditions that have a whole lot of evidence that show they are nothing but fads. I won’t bore you with the details, however, psychiatrists, as a group, have a lot of difficulty doing any sort of double blind studies since for the vast majority of the cases there is a huge amount of subjectivity involved in diagnosis. As a consequence publication stringency has to be dropped in comparison with the more hard medicine and science. I think it is easy to argue that that stringency has dropped too much. As I have talked about here before (but am too lazy to look for examples), it is not that challenging at all for ‘real’ scientists to completely fuck up their experimental design and wind up with nothing but wish fulfillment. Given the ease for this happening in hard science, I think it is safe to assume that it happens a whole lot more in psychiatry. Indeed, assuming there is a bit of positive feedback (meaning first the industry attracts people who aren’t that stringent minded who then mentor people who then wind up being reviewers, etc.) it is plausible to assume the majority, if not nearly all, the results published could be questionable. I have no doubt that psychiatrists would object to my characterization, but I doubt any will read my blog so figure I can be free with my opinion.

So, to me the take-home from this article is that one should likely greet any psychiatric diagnosis and concomitant prescription with a grain of salt, a huge block if it is coming from your GP.

Patent trolls

Stop Blaming Trolls for the Patent Problem
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/stop-blaming-the-trolls-or-we-wont-be-able-to-fix-the-patent-system/

I talked about my ideas for patent reform before, but didn’t mention so-called patent trolls. Generally speaking (to me) these ‘trolls’ are not really gaming the system but are doing what the system has been designed to do. Just because Apple is an actual product company with employees other than patent lawyers doesn’t mean they are not abusing the system (as mentioned in my earlier link, patents were originally intended to foster innovation, not act as roadblocks). Companies that exist only to prosecute infringers of their intellectual property might be annoying and inconvenient, but by the same token companies making a profit by infringing on patents are also gaming the system. Our system is truly dysfunctional, but doing something specific about ‘trolls’ without also addressing the anti competitive behavior of companies like Apple (SHIELD act) is nothing more than a potentially massive gift to the infringers of the world and yet another (shocking, I know) stab in the back of the little guy.

Too big to fail about to be addressed?

Live-Blogging Senate Hearing Tomorrow, When J.P. Morgan Chase Will Be Torn a New One
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/live-blogging-senate-hearing-tomorrow-when-j-p-morgan-chase-will-be-torn-a-new-one-20130314

I have complained off and on about this idiotic ‘too big to fail’ crap for years (now we have “too big to jail” as well) but sort of lost faith that anything would be done about it. I do, however, recall from my reading on the ‘Great Depression’ (as opposed to our ‘Great Recession’; the only difference being the shreds of safety net the GOP keeps wanting to eliminate) that it took many years (nigh on a decade, I believe) before any substantive changes were made. Perhaps this hearing Matt is talking about represents the first sign of a sea change that will push back against these idiotic ‘too big to fail/jail’ banks. One can hope, dream, fantasize, eh? Of course, as long as Obama is in office there is zero chance that any legislation will get passed, so we are stuck for at least the next 4 years. It is hard for me to imagine that any GOP candidate would push back against the banks and just as hard to imagine any Democratic candidate surviving the primaries talking about taking on the banks, but then again, Obama pretty much went back on every single promise he made during his campaign (some even before he got elected!) so I supposed I can fantasize about a candidate that takes money from the banks and then ‘turns on them’.

Yeah, I know: I am dreaming!

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

So I happen across this article:

Scientists Publish Controversial Paper About Extra-Terrestrial Life on Meteorites
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/scientists-publish-controversial-paper-about-extra-terrestrial-life-meteorites

and think to myself, “that is quite interesting that there should be such ‘definitive’ evidence of extraterrestrial life and I am only finding out about it accidentally”, so I investigate. Fortunately the main author has a rather unique name (well, it seems unique to me, perhaps it is as common as John Smith wherever he is from), sure enough I find he has a Wiki page as the first hit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe. I am a bit surprised that I haven’t heard of this guy, I am quite interested in the origin of life and while I am no expert, I have read quite a bit over the years and the guy’s name really stands out, I figure I would remember it. Well, I get really suspicion when the second sentence reads “He was a student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle”. Those of you who know anything about the history of science know that Hoyle started out as a really smart guy, then sort of drifted off into left field (really, he just left the ball park) and absolutely could not accept any of the evidence of the big bang (indeed, Hoyle invented the term ‘big bang’ as an insult to the theory; how vexing it must have been to him that it stuck and became a badge of honor). Hoyle was a proponent of the steady state theory of the universe (which was quite fine at the time when we knew pretty much nada) but rather than accept that his theory lacked any sort of evidence AND that the competing theory (big bang) was stacking up evidence, he sort of went crazy and started to make personal attacks and did his level best to discredit the science in the public eye. So, to make a long story less long, he became a real nut job toward the end of his life and pretty much has burned every shred of his scientific credibility by the time he died. (Note that he was a major contributor to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and the vast bulk of that work has withstood the test of time. He wasn’t an idiot.) So to find out that the guy behind this extraordinary claim is associated with Hoyle automatically makes me treat everything he says with skepticism.

So, looking at the Google results I scroll down a bit to the first hit that doesn’t seem to be a repeat of the article above and click over here: Chandra Wickramasinghe replies…and fails hard which is rather unflattering, then follow the link to this: Diatoms…iiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace! which is even less flattering. I decide to look up the journal (Journal of Cosmology) and am more than a bit put off by the page and its ‘color scheme’. I have been to a _lot_ of journal sites over the last 3 decades and this one seems to strive hard to break every bit of the mold it could. Never-the-less, I do a search to find the article: FOSSIL DIATOMS IN A NEW CARBONACEOUS METEORITE (at least I think this is the article that is the focus of the link above, but it seems there might be more than one) and skim through it. I don’t know a whole lot about meteorites, but I have read off and on over the years so I am not totally ignorant. The picture they have of the meteor doesn’t look like any I have ever seen, but hey, I am not an expert. So I decide to pursue it a bit more and look up the following links: No, Diatoms Have Not Been Found in a Meteorite and UPDATE: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite. Granted, none of these are scientific sites, but then again, neither is that of the original link. However, everything that the author of these last two sites had to say jives with what I have absorbed over the decades and little of what the controversial author of the extraordinary claims had to say jived with my knowledge base. Sadly, I have to conclude that this paper is nothing more than willful ignorance that is substantially harmful to science since way more people are going to read about it from uncritical sources than will ever follow up with the critical sources. Such is life in good old anti-science USofA.

And I would like to believe! I have theory that there is life between the solar systems, but I also demand extraordinary evidence from extraordinary claims. When someone is claiming something that is way outside the scientific mainstream he/she has to go to extra lengths to bolster those claims. When NASA claimed many years ago to have found fossils on a Martian meteor (I actually happened to watch that presentation live, purely by accident, and could barely sit still as I came to understand what they were claiming), though they were very confident of their claims, none-the-less they were careful to discuss alternatives and have outside investigators comment on their work. That work, btw, has been mostly debunked over the years as other scientists with particular expertise have weighted in (all without name calling, btw! something that seemingly can’t be said of the Journal of Cosmology). Panspermia has some things going for it and is impossible to prove impossible. It is, however, trivial to prove it is correct, one need merely find extraterrestrial material with life that is clearly not of terrestrial origin. However, when/if that happens, I expect to see papers devoted entirely to describing the evidence and extensive methods involved in clearly demonstrating that all scientifically rational efforts have been made to eliminate any other explanation. To me this paper claiming diatoms from space is light years away from achieving that end.

Success happens when you have a coincidence of talent, resources, and timing

Management/Success/Leadership: Mostly Bullshit
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/managementsuccessleadership_mostly_bullshit/

Scott Adams sometimes has very thought provoking things to say. Sometimes it is just bla bla bla (I am quite guilty of the same), but, as is said, the broken clock is right twice a day, so by shear verbiage he has to say something interesting from time to time (I hope I do the same). To me this is one of those days.

Anyway, I spent a lot of the late ’80s and early ’90s reading the sort of management books he talks about and I agree whole heartedly: they are total crap. The reasons for success are actually quite simple: be in the right place at the right time with an open mind. Anything else is a recipe for failure. Get those three things right and you, too, will be hugely famous for having been on the right street corner at the right time and willing to say ‘yes’ when asked of you. It is really depressing that success is so capricious, but without being born to the right parents and going to the right schools (and nodding at the right time and place, never forget that!) the likelihood of any given individual, no matter how talented, of being successful is slightly better than buying lotto tickets. If I ever do become successful you dear readers can brag about how obvious it was in my clearly insightful writing and maybe get a bit of reflected glory. Of course, as is more likely to be the case, I am just one of billions who do no more than fantasize, you can chortle up your sleeve at what an idiot I am.

I am not sure if someone else (famous) ever said it, but I like to use this to describe success:

The only difference between an idiot and a genius is how they are treated by history.

So far, I am an idiot.

Robots with brains in the cloud?

Web-based ‘brain’ for robots goes live
Robots confused about what they encounter in the world of humans can now get help online.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21714191

Well, I am sad to say I didn’t see this one coming. It makes sense, though, and undoubtedly is a smart thing to do (particularly presuming you want to hasten the day when Skynet takes control). Scott Adams also has a piece that is apropos. I expect that the more sophisticated robots will use this information as guidelines only, so when the information gets hacked they won’t all the sudden go evil on us, but the less sophisticated ones might just take whatever it finds there as gospel and act on it without any consideration for what might have been gospel just a few minutes earlier.

Personally I hope that we get direct brain implants that will connect us to networks before we get assassinated by our robot slaves, at least that way I can enjoy my presumed enhanced intellect for a while before our demise.

Social security ‘fixes’ hurt the most needy

Social Security, Life Expectancy, and Income Inequality
http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/social-security-life-expectancy-and-income-inequality/

Prior to reading the article above (though the thoughts had been percolating for a while), I was a strong proponent of increasing the retirement age for social security. “Everyone knows” that life expectancy has been increasing in the US and now people are retired a lot longer than they used to be (when Social Security first got started the retirement age was only a year or two less than the average life expectancy, so we, as a society, have been enjoying extended retirements for quite a while). On the surface it would seem a trivial solution, just up the retirement age a few years. However, as the graph below shows (borrowed from Jared’s site), the life expectancy increase has clear demographic breakdowns and those people that need the support of Social Security the most (meaning those who earn the least, have the most physical jobs (meaning that working longer is physically debilitating) and likely the fewest assets to draw upon once retired) have been benefiting from the increased longevity the least. As such it would be incredibly regressive (which, sadly, is the way of the oligarchy now in control of our government) to increase the retirement age for these people. For people like me, who sit in a chair all day and get paid a crap load of money, increasing the retirement age would have very little negative impact (indeed, for me it would mean an increase in retirement assets). However, for the blue collar types who have often abused their bodies when they were younger, working longer is highly problematic.

Skewed income and life expectancy
St Johns is a Florida county with relatively high standards of living while Putnam is also a Florida county but with relatively low standards of living.

The benefits of global warming

Two interesting articles on global warming and that it ain’t so bad for certain people/ecosystems…

Extra Heat Turning Northern Latitudes Green
http://frenchtribune.com/teneur/1316622-extra-heat-turning-northern-latitudes-green-study

Global Warming Pushing Trees North
http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/trees-invade-arctic-tundra-130311.htm

Just like how global warming can help shipping and the ozone hole, it seems it will extend forests and other vegetation. Land that was once too marginal to support agriculture will now be ideal, though likely that will come at the cost of land that will be lost to agriculture but such is the nature of change. This planet would be really damn boring if it never changed!

Paleo diet

What The Hardened Arteries Of Ancient Mummies Mean For Picking A Diet
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/03/11/what-the-hardened-arteries-of-ancient-mummies-mean-for-picking-a-diet/

While I think this article is pointing out the obvious, it seems clear that to a lot of people this isn’t obvious at all. While nearly everyone (particularly in the US, but our way of life is contaminating the world) now has ‘rich people’ diseases (heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc.), they are called ‘rich people’ diseases because they used to be very common _only_ among the rich. Eating a highly refined diet and not getting any exercise used to cost a great deal, today it is the cheapest lifestyle. As a consequence, only the rich can afford to eat unrefined meals and get exercise. So, the point of the article is to let everyone know that to live a long healthy life requires a lot of effort and being primitive didn’t mean they were free from our ‘rich people’ diseases.