Then again…

Humans didn’t breed with Neanderthals
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/65398-humans-didnt-breed-with-neanderthals

It seems I may have spoken too soon. It seems there is a perfectly plausible explanation for the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in our genome: we share common ancestors.

This is how science works, though. Unfortunately it tends to make ignorant people think that science is incapable of discovering the ‘truth’ (it is out there!) and that ‘truth’ is malleable by anyone who wants to have a different opinion. While science gets started as nothing more than opinion, that opinion must be backed up with facts and must explain _all_ the facts that are available, not just a few selected ones. When someone comes up with a better opinion it is because it better explains the available facts. Scientists get excited when a ‘story’ (opinion) predicts something that is subsequently discovered as a new fact (why Einstein is such a hero). Sometimes it is very difficult, expensive and/or time consuming to collect new facts (for instance, all this about the Higgs boson) and stories are all we have to work with (see string theory for an example). When (seemingly willfully) ignorant people claim that science and scientists can’t agree, they are often discussing areas of research that are novel or where facts are “difficult, expensive and/or time consuming to collect” and thus opinions/stories are evolving. Because that sort of research is likely to get the most press, these (willfully) ignorant people then attack any part of science they don’t agree with (such as evolution) and point to the bits where there is a flux in agreement amongst scientists as justification.

Romney/Ryan (or is that Ryan/Romney?)

The Five Fatal Flaws of Romney’s Ryan Veep Pick
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-five-fatal-flaws-of-romneys-ryan-veep-pick-20120812

I didn’t feel motivated to comment on this before, but figured I would slide this one in here for any of my reader(s) who might still be considering Romney as a lesser evil compared to the Constitutional shredding evil we have in office today. It nicely sums up what I recall reading about Ryan and his rather idiotic (if you are not in the 1%, of course; ZERO taxes on capital gains and dividends?) budget proposal, but also points out some other issues that make me think that Romney is just making things worse. It is like he is so passionate about disavowing the ‘etch-a-sketch’ comment that he wants to pivot further to the right instead of towards the center. I am not sure how he thinks that will win him independents and keep him from losing moderate Republicans, but he is well known to listen to only a small inner circle and perhaps that inner circle is either lying to itself or simply lying to Romney for some reason.

Now that Ryan has been chosen the airwaves are going to be flooded with the proposed damage to old people, a demographic that traditionally has a high voter turnout AND one that tended to vote Republican. What chance that these people will simply stay home now? Romney basically needs every single white vote he can get, what with his alienating the Hispanics and the blacks so consistently, now he is driving away retirees, a group that tends to be disproportionately white.

Big brother… Is In Your Car!!!!

Is Your Car Being Tracked by a License-Plate Scanner?
The government can now track your movements when you drive and, over time, put together a profile of how you lead your life
http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/13/is-your-car-being-tracked-by-a-license-plate-scanner/?hpt=hp_t2

To a certain extent this is much ado about nothing. The roads are public and following people on public roads is not an issue. However, relatively recently the Supreme Court ruled that putting a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car required a warrant (see here for some info) because while there is no expectation of privacy if you are being followed, there is an expectation of privacy if no one is following you. This use of cameras for tracking license plates is a bit of a gray zone, though, unless the cameras are clearly visible, easy to see and remain mostly static (meaning they aren’t constantly being shifted around) and, of course, aren’t ubiquitous. The bigger issue, though, is likely the creation of the long-term database on people’s movements. Given the unanimity of the SC ruling I would have to imagine that they will look critically on collecting all this detailed information on citizen’s movements for no reason. Add to that the fact that much of this data is being shared I would expect that once the cases finally wind their way through the courts (first someone has to be ‘injured’ by the policy in order to have ‘standing’) they will put the breaks on it. However, if the government is clever (sometimes they don’t bother being clever, they just ignore the laws; that is one of the prime definitions of a police state, donachano) they will see to it that there are few to zero cases where anyone is actually ‘harmed’ by the policy, thus staving off any sort of judicial resolution for years, possibly decades.

Meaning making machines

Over the weekend I read this interesting post from Scott Adams:

My Crackpot Theory of Intelligence
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/my_crackpot_theory_of_intelligence/

In his post Scott basically says that intelligence is the same as pattern recognition. At first it sounds rather idiotic (I think Scott likes to start off sounding idiotic just to get people’s dander up (and what the hell is ‘dander’ and why would you not like it ‘up’?)), but as I read it sounded increasingly plausible. I have favored the idea of evolutionary programming techniques (most famous is genetic algorithms) for a long time (that is how I got my start programming), largely I think because one of the core elements of my personality is being lazy as hell. I favor the idea of writing a master program which then does the real programming (its first task might be to rewrite it, thus hopefully removing all my human errors) in a much faster and vastly less error prone way, but writing that master program is the challenge.

If, though, we take on the idea of pattern matching as intelligence, then I can see some ways around this. Pattern matching can be recursive and like fractals, operates at each level of resolution. The basic issue I see, though, is seeding the initial database. Simply making patterns match isn’t intelligence (would anyone care to consider ‘grep‘ intelligent, no matter how useful it is? (btw, I found this amusing quote at the wiki page: “You can’t grep dead trees”)), you need to have a database of conclusions based on locating (or not locating) patterns. For humans part of that is hard-wired in, but a large amount of it is learned through experience (I love Scott’s analogy of dreams: your brain is just bubble sorting new memories into its database), but for a machine it might be better to hard-code some basic information before we set it loose to start its own learning. Of course, the massive upside to machine learning is it only needs to be successful once, then that instance can be replicated an infinite time.

Regarding the multiple senses involved in the pattern matching, that is something else that rings true to me. Sometimes isolated bits of information are meaningless no matter how many ways they are presented. If your sensory tools cannot provide you with any meaningful context then the information contained in the data is lost. Additional sensory tools provide additional context enable a more rich extraction of information from the available data. The addition of more (different) sensors might work in a geometric fashion, so perhaps just the few that Scott describes would be enough.

When I was much younger (before I learned anything about computers or programming) I was very interested in AI. As I learned about programming I decided to pick up some books on AI and see how I could contribute but found the books to be so dense in math as to be incomprehensible (sort of like my love/hate relationship with image analysis). Also, since I very early on became a ‘speed freak’ when it comes to computing, the idea of using LISP which appeared to be something that had to be interpreted at run time (as opposed to compiled), not to mention totally impossible for me to read, sucked the life out of that idea straight away. I have tried my hand at genetic programming using C++ (something that can be compiled and optimized for the hardware architecture) from time to time, but I haven’t taken anything to completion enough to test for utility. It seems I am too lazy to write my master program!

Interspecies sex?

Tangled Roots
Mingling among Stone Age peoples muddies humans’ evolutionary story
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/342924/title/Tangled_Roots

Of course, defining what a ‘species’ is is challenging to begin with. I am quite interested in human evolution and have read quite a bit on the subject over the years and have never really been sold on the idea that moderns humans drove the Neanderthals out (they appear to have been exceptionally well suited for their environment). However, if, as seems clearly the case based on this article, the two groups were capable of freely interbreeding (in which case I would not be so quick to call them separate species), it seems quite plausible to me that there would be some (perhaps quite a bit) of dallying with one another. Humans, as a group, tend to favor breeding outside of their local group (perhaps the reason why ‘exotic’ women tend to turn heads and attract attention the way they do), so it makes sense to me that there would be interbreeding. Given this article I would have to say that the differences between ‘Neanderthals’, ‘Denisovans’ and ‘Homo sapiens’ are nothing more than archeologists wanting to make a name for themselves. If they can interbreed (as seems clear from the DNA evidence) then the only reason they could be considered separate ‘species’ is if they failed to do so in proximity (such as lions and tigers), which belies the DNA evidence, or were simply separated by physical distance. Since ‘modern’ humans are such prolific travelers, clearly distance was easily overcome, so by my reckoning there is just the one species.

Help for criminals

Camera hack can spot cleaned-up crimes
Technology can help police find painted-over bloodstains
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/343007/title/Camera_hack_can_spot_cleaned-up_crimes

Fortunately, criminals, as a species, are too knuckle-headed to read things like this, so there is little worry that it will be used to hinder any investigations. It is interesting to me that most modern CCD-based cameras work excellently in the near IR range (you see this in the ‘green’ light of night-shot cameras (though be warned, if someone is looking at you with an IR viewer (basically, any CCD-equiped device) you are visible from _miles_ away). An accident of the way they are designed, but a happy accident for peeping toms, I guess.

As if it needed to be articulated…

Obama Administration Needs to Tap, Not Stiff-Arm, Wall Street Whistleblowers
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-obama-administration-needs-to-tap-not-stiff-arm-wall-street-whistleblowers-20120809

I am not sure why I felt the need to post this. The article is so depressing that I actually suggest my reader(s) not read it. It is all about why we are in a oligarchical police state with zero prospects of things getting better.

You have been warned!

This could be a great thing

Could lasers solve the military’s friendly-fire problem?
http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/09/could-lasers-solve-the-militarys-friendly-fire-problem/?hpt=hp_bn5

There is a similar sort of thing for aircraft and allow for identification of friend/foe (well, you be a foe if you don’t identify as friend). My biggest concern is that it might reveal your location if you get lit up. Yes, it requires a specific code, but how ‘visible’ is the signal? It doesn’t have to be visible to human eye to be easily detectable and the last thing you might need is some sort of radiation coming from your position as you are sneaking up on someone.

One big issue I have with a lot of these new gizmos is that they seem to put a larger and larger reliance on technology. Technology is well known to fail and most forms of technology often have vulnerabilities that can be exploited at critical junctures. By increasing the level of technology you are potentially decreasing the level of training necessary to provide an effective war fighter, but that means when the technology fails you have an ineffective war fighter.

Still, something that can help with the fog of war is valuable. When I was in the Virginia National Guard I was in an infantry unit and one summer we did an exercise where we were an invading army. Quite a sobering experience, _LOTS_ of friendly fire! To make the experience ‘realistic’ we had lasers mounted on our rifles that would fire when we shot off blanks (some people figured out that if you taped the rifle butt just the right way the laser would fire, but without making any noise). We wore a harness that had laser receivers which would set off an alarm that could only be silenced by removing a key from the laser on the rifle which would disable the laser. We also had sensors on our helmets so you could get taken out by snipers if you stuck your head up. It was realistic in that people couldn’t claim that they hadn’t been hit, at least. Tanks, trucks, helicopters, etc. all had the receivers so they could be shot at, though I suspect there was some information in the laser that told it what size round was being simulated so tanks, for instance, could ignore rifle fire.

My unit was designated as scouts and our job was to look for enemy units and have our trailing company detour around them. It turns out that the enemy (regular army guys who all they did was practice making chumps like us look like idiots) knows that also and would quietly let us pass, then massacre the company as it came behind us. Thus, we, as a scout unit, were never targeted by the bad guys. None-the-less, we were targeted: we had a friendly artillery attack called on our position (it seems they were targeting anything that moved), something we were able to escape because to mark the impact of the simulated round a guy on a very noisy 4 wheeler (and wearing a bright orange helmet) would drive to the coordinates, set off a noise maker, then hit everyone he could see with a laser. Naturally when we heard him drive up we boogied on out of there, how realistic is that?

One evening we hooked up with our massacred mortar unit (we were hoping to get food at this point; because our company had been blown to bits we weren’t able to resupply) and found some old fox holes to hide in (they were partying it up (or as much as possible with little food) around camp fires because they were ‘dead’). That evening we were watching a simulated air strike against the next hill, something that was actually a bit beautiful. What makes it so horrifying is a) it was supposed to be against our hill and b) it was our aircraft. Which is worse? That they hit the wrong hill or that they were friendlies?

I believe it was the next day when we were trying to find our reconstituted company (we were getting really hungry at this point) when we were ‘attacked’ by a helicopter. We were able to bring it down by shooting up from inside some bushes (lasers are effectively blocked by lasers, doanchano), which, naturally, is not very likely something that would work in the real world. Shockingly, we discovered that it was one of ours. For those of you counting, this is three attacks and three out of three were friendly fire.

Later we were finally able to hook up with our company and get the food we desperately needed, but made the fatal mistake of not immediately leaving. I believe there were 60 or 70 of us on this hill top and a group of 14 bad guys (OPFOR or Opposing Force) fired a few shots into our group. We did all the rest, we reacted just like a nest of bees being whacked by a stick and went all ape shit. Guys started to sweep out looking for the bad guys (who just faded into the bushes), then would swing to the left or right putting themselves in the line of fire from the rest of the company. I don’t know if that lead to any friendly casualties, but I recall _very_ clearly that one of our machine gun teams had got turned around and were setting up pointing back at the company, and most importantly, _directly_ at me. So, given the racket and that we were all dressed the same, I viewed my choice as dying by friendly fire or killing with friendly fire. I lit them up in self defense.

The bad guys, btw, called in an artillery strike on the hill top once they had pulled away and once again the company was massacred. This wound up being a couple day break for us, though, as the convoy they sent out to pick up our ‘bodies’ (in order to be resurrected they had to bring you back to the base for processing) got taken out and they had to send wreckers to get the vehicles before they could finally get us.

Final tally, by my count, was 5 attacks, 4 friendly fire events, or 80% ‘blue on blue’.

As I recall, everyone in our unit ‘died’ several times, so we probably had over 200% casualties in just two weeks. Easy to brush that off when it is all lasers, not so easy when you figure what it would be like in reality.

Leadership is the primary question and Mr. Romney is showing none!

(This title was taken from one of the comments on the article, I felt it was quite apropos.)

Did Romney enable company’s abusive tax shelter?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/08/opinion/canellos-kleinbard-romney-taxes/index.html

In the unlikely even that I have any Romney supporters amongst my reader(s), here is more evidence that this guy is a much worse evil than the evil guy currently in office. This guy (Romney) is clearly intent on maximizing profits at the expense of society. Is this the sort of person who you would want as President? When someone clearly thinks that paying taxes in a society is for suckers, how can anyone think that same person will have the greatest good for the greatest number in mind? Taxes are part of the payment for a civil society; somehow government has to be paid for and only idiots who have never studied human nature think that all governments are bad things (granted there are wide ranges of government, but even Saddam Hussein brought power, water, education, freedom of religion and women’s rights to his country (and Hitler created those awesome autobahns, which lead to Eisenhower creating our awesome (but deteriorating) Interstate system)). We can all argue over the correct level of government, but Romney seems to sincerely think that government itself is bad. What so many rich anti-government people conveniently forget is that without a strong government and fairly applied laws, none of them would have got or stayed wealthy.

BTW, for those of you interested in what the heck ‘son of BOSS’ is, here is the Wiki link.

Humans impacting climate by not burning fossil fuels…

A new global warming offender: Dam drawdowns
http://www.petridishnews.com/news/a-new-global-warming-offender-dam-drawdowns/

I wonder how this changes the proportion of CO2 to methane that otherwise would have happened without the dam. The vast majority of biological material is recycled, most of it on an annual basis, and what leads to the annual variation in measured CO2 levels:

(from Wikipedia)
CO2 levels

However, if the bulk of the material is converted to CO2 (as opposed to methane) when it isn’t underwater, then creating dams and the cycling that most dams undergo (most dams are designed with two purposes: first to reduce storm surges and second to generate power or supply irrigation water which in most cases leads to substantial changes in water level over the course of a year) could dramatically shift the proportion to methane. Methane (as the author points out) is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, so while the carbon amount might be identical the ability to trap heat is much different. Methane is also lighter than air (CO2 is heavier) (you can make a methane balloon if you like) and thus would be expected to rise high in the stratosphere and could interact with the ozone layer (I don’t know if this has been scientifically measured, but I throw it out for consideration) and create very high ice crystals (methane having four hydrogen atoms per carbon atom, thus reactions with ozone yields water) which could actually result in a cooling effect by reflecting light before it can reach the surface.

I don’t dispute that humans are impacting our planet, nor do I dispute that humans are having negative impacts on the global ecosystem. I just want to have rational discussions on the best course of action to address these issues without being condemned for being a ‘denialist’ simply because I am not convinced that burning fossil fuels is the major contributor to the changes in the ecosystem. I am also very far from convinced that the only possible remediation effort is to destroy our global civilization by insisting on eliminating fossil fuel usage. I am particularly opposed to the focus on eliminating fossil fuel usage because I believe that the damage to the global ecosystem is not going to be reduced by the slightest amount by eliminating fossil fuel usage, so we will have destroyed our civilization for nothing.

Not that we won’t have the civilization destroying potential when we finally exhaust fossil fuels if there is nothing to pick up the slack. However, according to my calculations, biofuels have the potential to pick up the slack, but not until transportation fuels start to have a wholesale (pre-tax) price of around $10 a gallon. I expect we are going to hit that long before we run out of fossil fuels and I am aiming to be poised to take advantage of that.