Another idea for a low-powered probe

Inside a Martian tumbleweed rover
http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/63577-inside-a-martian-tumbleweed-rover

This is apropos my post yesterday. I wonder if it is possible to make this thing somewhat directional. I imagine you could put flaps or something whose angle could be altered to produce more resistance on one side of the vehicle than another which could provide some crude steering and I can also imagine doing something to alter the center of gravity as well. Plus, if the structure were inflatable (as opposed to rigid, but flexible), you could potentially send several in a single space probe and then have them wander the planet’s surface somewhat independently.

I have always thought that scientists would still make dramatic discoveries if they had to work with tiny budgets, they would just have to be more creative. Great science doesn’t have to come with multi-billion dollar price tags, though I can state from personal experience having a steady paycheck and at least a modest long-term budget makes a huge difference toward allowing the creativity necessary to come up with these sorts of inexpensive ways to explore nature.

Not that Obama is one bit better

Since I rag on Romney all the time I figured I would slid this one in to try to even things up a bit…

WH leaks for propaganda film
The administration takes a break from its war on whistleblowers to provide classified information to Hollywood
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/23/wh_leaks_for_propaganda_film/

Just to be crystal clear, I think either choice is a very bad one for our country. I see no point on voting this fall, it would be like choosing your method of execution. I don’t see this as a choice between bad and worse, I the choice between two worst. Our country is totally fucked for at least the next 4 years, the only hope of something different (and not a very good hope at that, I guess he would be ‘bad’ rather than ‘worst’) is Ron Paul.

Cancer screening and saving lives

Prostate cancer screening’s false promise
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/22/opinion/brawley-prostate-screening/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

The first time I did any reading on prostate cancer was a number of years ago when my father-in-law had a positive PSA test. Based on my reading at the time there was a substantial likelihood that he could simply ignore the results and do fine (he is an EENT doctor, so clearly one able to do his own research and make his own decisions, I don’t think we ever talked about it). He chose to get surgery (he was a guinea pig for some NIH research) and I know he was incontinent for quite a while afterwards (months, a year perhaps). He slyly notes, though, that ‘everything works perfectly’, to my mother-in-law’s embarrassment, so all in all he seems to have escaped the worst side effects.

I have also read extensively about breast cancer (my mom was diagnosed a number of years ago (and we did talk about alternatives based on my research)) and the bulk of my research indicates that there is little value in mammograms for the same reason that there seems to be little value in the PSA test. If the exam only finds benign tumors (meaning ones that will never threaten the life of the patient, either because it grows so slow it never will be a problem no matter how long the patient lives, or the patient is old enough that she (or he, men get it also!) is likely to die of something else first), then in essentially all cases the treatment is worse than doing nothing. There is this really interesting study from Europe where a country (don’t recall which one, but some Scandinavian one I believe) had really excellent health records, but previously hadn’t offered mammograms to the general public. They looked at the death rate from breast cancer before and after the implementation of the screening and guess what? No change at all! That seems pretty damning to me that the screening is useless and when you think about all the angst these poor women went through, some going to far as to get mastectomies (I was able to help convince my mother go to with lumpectomy, though she elected to add on radiation treatments), the screening does far more harm than it does good. It seems quite crystal clear to me that the PSA test does exactly the same thing (meaning more harm than good) and I strongly suspect that there are plenty of other screening test that have the exact same problem (colonoscopy ranks right up there near the top to me).

Eat right, exercise regularly, look both ways before you cross the street, don’t marry a vengeful spouse and then cheat on her, those are the things that are smart and proven to help extend your life and health.

A little strident, but still thought provoking

Is Cheating a Rational Choice?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-anderson-phd/cheating_b_1528890.html

There is quite a bit of absolutism in the article that I object to. I don’t think that _all_ and _everyone_ and other such absolute terms are very good science. Human nature is so variable that I immediately become suspicion of anyone, most particularly in the soft-sciences, who makes such dramatic statements. Having said that, based on my personal experience and discussions with friends, I believe that a large percentage of what the author discusses is right on the mark (though if I were doing the writing, I would slide in a whole lot of caveats (but then again, this isn’t peer reviewed and is targeted toward the ‘popular’ press)). Men, as a group, have wandering eyes (I discuss some of that in a writeup you can read here if you are interested), women, as a group, want a stable provider. Men who were most successful over geological time (slight exaggeration for effect) spread their seed further and wider than those who kept with monogamy. Conversely, those women who dallied with a man perhaps unsuited as a provider, but provided better genes, likely were overrepresented compared to their monogamous counterparts. As such, it is very plausible to me that the ‘cheating’ gene would be well established in our species (fairly recently (now that DNA sequencing has got less expensive) scientists have found that nearly all the ‘monogamous’ bird species actually fool around as much as humans do). Thus, it would seem that the author’s premise that our culture is actually fostering divorce by denying us our biology is also quite plausible. Personally I have a low sex drive (for a guy) and as such I am not as constantly nagged by desires as the average dewd. I do, however, look around (my wife seems to have grown to tolerate that, though I am sure she would rather I didn’t) and am a regular user of ‘net porn (pretty much my only vice other than cigars) so other women focus in my fantasies (I am sure I am going to catch hell for this post ;-)). I can still imagine, though, that if we had a more permissive society (and my wife bought into such) that I might easily move beyond fantasies. I doubt I am alone and given my relative lack of sex drive I imagine that the average fellow is way more likely to act on it.

Of course, cheating men would have no way to cheat if it weren’t also for cheating women. If there were no recipient for their attentions, I am sure that men would not have evolved the wandering eye, so it goes both ways. The reports I have read indicate that surveys report about equal cheating, men and women (about half each). Our society seems to have reduced somewhat the stigma of cheating, but only slightly, yet based on the research I have read there hasn’t been much of a change in long-term behavior by cheaters, so it might be that more permissiveness wouldn’t result in more cheating, just less divorces. Of course, I don’t expect our society to change, we can’t even legalize drugs and go bonkers regarding same-sex marriage. Still, it wasn’t that long ago that interracial marriage was illegal in a lot of places, so perhaps another generation and things will loosen up. I doubt that will change my behavior, though, my wife gets rather steely-eyed whenever I sidle up to the subject (as I am sure she will get when she reads this post).

Now this is really cool…

Can a Surfboard-Sized Watercraft Cross the Pacific on Wave Power Alone?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/wave-glider-crosses-pacific/

This is another one of those ideas that are so obvious once stated and yet remain so obscure until then. Once I read the description I easily envisioned how it would work, how simple it would be to build and how easy to operate. I am quite jealous, though I doubt that I would have been able to commercialize it, so my jealousy is rather nonsensical (heck, I can’t even commercialize my idea for a DNA sequencer and that fits snugly within my 20+ years of education and experience). So, I guess I am intellectually jealous, then, though since jealousy is irrational, I guess I don’t have to have any logical explanation.

Anyway, these things are brilliant in that they are directional and controllable. As the article mentions, there are plenty of measurements that are actually best done gradually and over an extended time, so using boats is quite problematic. Using buoys can also be quite problematic, particularly in the open ocean where the ocean bottom is miles below. If you want to measure something in one spot, simple, just ‘orbit’ a single location. I have tried to find backers for the same sort of concept, but at the top of the atmosphere instead. The so-called ‘atmospheric satellite’ has the potential to loiter in-place making for a ‘geostationary’ satellite for a tiny fraction of the cost and at a huge reduction in latency (5 miles vs 25,000 miles). Awesome observation platform as well, either for ground or sky. Sometimes I get very upset when I think about all the ideas I have had and that I have been able to pursue none of them (well, I am ‘pursuing’ aquaculture, but it will be at least another year and a half before I have any experimental results), so to keep myself from wallowing too much in depression my strategy is to simply not think about these things.

If you are not so much in a hurry, these approaches are excellent for inexpensive ways of exploration. I can imagine long-lived aliens sending probes to other solar systems that might take thousands of years to arrive, yet cost so little that they can easily send several to each interesting nearby star. The probe can then act as a relay and transmit (at light-speed, so the return information comes in years instead of millenia) information about the system, any signs of life (I can imagine teeny tiny robots being dropped off like grains of sand to explore bodies in the target system), resources, etc. Heck, Voyager is already outside our solar system and that was just a generation ago. If we weren’t such an impatient species, I can see us pursuing such investigation as well. I can imagine several inexpensive ways to explore our own solar system, but the travel time would be extensive (solar sails immediately come to mind, very low power, but ‘free’, just like the wave-powered vessel mentioned in the article above). Humans have such short attention spans (don’t get me started on politicians!), I just don’t see us capable of focusing on a problem for several thousand years to explore other stars. Heck, I have trouble envisioning my cheap way of exploring our own solar system and that could easily be done within a generation.

Just soazuno

Are the police tracking your calls?
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/22/opinion/crump-cellphone-privacy/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

I would be shocked to find out if any of my reader(s) are shocked by reading this, but felt it had a place here none-the-less. In the ‘good old days’ the police had to go to a judge and get a warrant to access any of this type of information, but that has become too cumbersome today, so, much like during the mortgage loan fiasco, where legal documents were not duly registered because those managing the system couldn’t be bothered, the police don’t want to bother following the law either. Now, if we had a responsible judicial branch and judges started to throw out cases because of this illegally collected information, then I bet the police would find the time. Instead what I am seeing is the specific bits of information that were illegally collected are simply discarded, yet often times without that illegal information no case could have been built in the first place.

Of course, this is what police states do, so we must just get used to it.

The pill, the automobile and the Internet

What killed social conservatism?
Technological progress has made it impossible for conservatives to obscure the truth about Americans’ sex lives
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/what_killed_social_conservatism/

Really interesting article that (to me) seems to provide a deep insight to the right-wing way of thought. I found the idea of the conservatives making their own enclaves quite amusing, so did the author…

…the best hope for social conservatives is to retreat to minority enclaves like those of the Amish. On self-created reservations they can raise their children as they see fit, segregated from mainstream culture and visited, perhaps, by morally liberal tourists nostalgic for an older, simpler way of life. And if their fertility is higher than that of the morally liberal majority, they can hope to take over America by strength of numbers — in 500 or a thousand years.

Of course, this sort of thing is already happening (and has been happening off and on for at least centuries, probably millennia, yet the end of the world stubbornly refuses to come). Groups that are convinced that society has become so morally corrupt that it will implode have fission-ed themselves off into ‘cults’ and whatnot (remember the Branch Davidians?). They form their enclaves and fester in their own juices for a while, then generally are involved in some sort of legal trouble (like Warren Jeffs) and fade away, only to be replaced a few years later. Groups like the Amish, I believe, maintain long-term stability because they are not a) driven by individuals (e.g., David Koresh, Warren Jeffs) and b) allow youth to go out and experience the outside world, then welcome them back if they decided that they prefer the (Amish, in this case) cloistered life.

Insecuring applications

This was posted to a LinkedIn group I monitor:

Why Does Software Security Keep Falling off your Budget?
http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/21304-Why-Does-Software-Security-Keep-Falling-off-your-Budget.html

I wound up penning such a passionate response that I figured I would copy it here for my reader(s) amusement…

I like the focus on metrics, though I am not sure it gets us any closer to a resolution. How do you measure defects you haven’t discovered yet in code? How do you assess the vulnerability of an application that is not subject to attack by skilled, dedicated, highly motivated crackers? If a truly skilled white hat can get 100x his current income turning to the dark side, then decides to do so while maintaining his white hat persona, how the heck would we know? When she tells us our applications are secure is it because she hasn’t discovered an exploit because there aren’t any (yea, right), discovered an exploit but wants to sell it, or isn’t smart enough to find the exploit? Measuring the absence of something is challenging, proving something is secure without blowing up your budget AND being able to have high confidence in your result is nearly impossible.

And once all is said and done, even with perfect coding (like that will ever happen with us humans churning out the code), there can be design flaws that go undetected. There could even be a ‘perfect’ design, ‘perfectly’ implemented that still becomes insecure because of changing environment. When can the bosses be assured that they can finally stop spending money on securing an application? It is not hard to view us as charlatans that are just out to make a buck spreading FUD since we really can’t say we are doing anything meaningful. Then, to make matters far worse (as if that could be the case), from a business / economics point of view sometimes (often) there is a strong case that security simply doesn’t matter (at least until the company gets sued, but even then they can simply build that cost into the profit margins).

Since perfect security is probably unattainable it is not unreasonable for us to be ignored by management, even (especially) highly educated management. The way I like to characterize infosec is analogous to the hikers being chased by a hungry bear. You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the slower guy. If your organization has been specifically targeted by a “skilled, dedicated, highly motivated cracker” then there isn’t much you can do about it. However, you can avoid the random hungry bears by doing lots of little, fairly inexpensive things, things to raise the bar to the point where only “skilled, dedicated, highly motivated crackers” can penetrate your system, so the bear will move on to some other organization.

There is a lot of really crappy code written, even by people who know better. I think that security should be presented as a way to make applications with fewer bugs that will embarrass the organization, potentially costing them money through lost customers (or even customer suits). If we could get ourselves inserted into the design phase and have substantial input on the development process (insisting on such silly things like test suites, regression tests, independent (and well compensated) testers, etc.) I think we could have a much greater impact.

To get anyone (who controls money) to care, we are going to have to stop with the FUD and start presenting things from the perspective they care about.

“New Economy Movement”

Rise of the New Economy Movement
A growing number of theorists and activists are experimenting with new business models that go beyond profit
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/rise_of_the_new_economy_movement/

Many of the ideas outlined in the article I believe are right on target for developing long-term resolutions to many of our current economic issues (tellingly, this quote: “One recent calculation is that
400 individuals at the top now own more wealth than the bottom 160 million.”). While I am programmed (by personality as well as education) to maximize profit by charging exactly what the market will bear, I am also very cognizant of the fact that there are markets that should be managed for the greater good of the greatest number (utilities immediately leap to mind). I like the idea of true employee-owned companies (not the faux employee-owned companies seen so often, when a tiny group owns 60% or more of the voting stock and 90%+ of the rest of the employees own 10-20% (in aggregate) or less) where the company is managed by people responsible to the actual employees. Sure, they are not likely to be _as_ profitable as competitors, but as long as they _can_ operate profitably and can gainfully employ people (and are not being ripped off by executives taking million-dollar salaries), then that is a very good approach. Unions are not inherently evil (though I sometimes make such knee-jerk statements), they just tend to be managed ‘evilly’ by people who don’t give a damn about the members / employees.

I really like the idea of co-ops (tried to interest people in an aquacultural co-op, but I think it is too novel too soon for the average farmer (and, I believe at this time, has the potential to make a crap load of money, so I aim to snag my share before the excess profit is wrung out)), as long as the executives pay is kept reasonable (where reasonable, in my mind (and in this economic climate) is likely around $250K (inclusive of all benefits and deferred payments)). In co-ops any excess profit is returned to the owners, so as long as it is efficiently managed it provides the very best goods and services for the money.

Certainly some things are going to be more efficiently done/made in certain locations, so there should still be quite a bit of trade, but Enron-esque crap like deliberately causing blackouts in order to drive up prices would be largely impossible if instead there were neighboring co-ops providing, for example, energy (in the case of Enron). Another problem with hyper specialization is that local governance can be overwhelmed leading to destruction of the environment or hyper-aggressive short-term planning/decision making at the expense of the long-term health and welfare of the community. The rampant harvesting of old-growth forest is a perfect example. The local communities worked themselves right out of business and the corporate raiders that grew fat from the unsustainable harvest just wandered to find another body to suck dry. If less over-all efficient methods of doing things (such as local small utilities owned by the communities, smaller, locally owned and operated manufacturing, etc.) are contemplated for basal-level subsistence (meaning only ‘luxuries’ are imported) then communities are much less likely to be held hostage by remote corporate interests. The whole idea of economies of scale only really scale efficiently if there is lots of competition and plenty of ready suppliers if an Eron-like operator starts to game the system. Capitalism (contrary to the impression that Wall Street likes to provide) breaks down when there is a lack of competition. Capitalism depends on competition on a level playing field with very low levels of information asymmetry. What we have today is far from that ideal and I can absolutely guarantee to you that if we had highly competitive markets with high degrees of information availability and awareness that no executive would get $100 million salaries because the profit margins simply wouldn’t allow it. Our ‘capitalism’ today is a skewed representation that is used like a red cape to wave in front of the right-wing ignorant masses to keep them confused and misdirected.

Oligarchy != capitalism!

If the GOP right-wing nut jobs weren’t so damn stupid (of course, the left-wing nut jobs are just as stupid, they just have different things to be stupid about (of course the middle-ground is made up of ignorant sheeple as well)) they would be all over this Occupy Wall Street thing. Oligarch is only good for the tiny fraction of the population that inhabit that space and guess what, Tea Partiers? Except for lottery-odds chances of success, it is a club you can only be born into. No amount of hard work (and no amount of tax breaks (and no amount of gun carrying)) will let you into that rarefied realm. My main objection to the left-wing nut jobs is that they want to legislate this ‘socialism’ and ram it down the throats of people via a bloated government program. These sorts of co-op type arrangements don’t need any damn regulation if the free market of a well-oiled capitalist machine is in place. In principle we don’t even need the government to break the backs of the oligarchy-owned monopolies, just enough regulation to keep the oligarchy from prohibiting us from implementing such. Fortunately, since the oligarchy is largely heredity, the members are, on average, dumber (on average) than the sheeple that populate the rest of the nation. As such, were we able to convince the left and the right (and the middle) to cooperate and resist the oligarchy-imposed divisiveness, we could simply produce a parallel economy and basically fission off from the oligarchy and let them continue to play in their little playgrounds until they finally realize how badly screwed they are (and it would be too late then).

Of course, as my regular reader(s) are well aware, I hold out no hope whatsoever that the ignorant sheeple massed will ever get their heads out of their asses long enough to smell the roses. While theoretically possible for things to get better without needing to get much worse, I don’t see that as practical and expect things to get far worse before there is any chance things will get better.

How America InJustice Plays Out

More than 2,000 wrongfully convicted people exonerated in 23 years, researchers say
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/21/more-than-2000-wrongfully-convicted-people-exonerated-in-23-years-researchers-say/?hpt=hp_t2

Sure, the overall number, as a percentage, is quite low, but consider that these are not the _suspected_ cases of wrongful convictions, but the ones actually proven in court resulting in the release of the wrongly convicted. Then there are the several (at least) cases of someone getting executed where there is overwhelming evidence of their innocence.

What is really interesting (scarey) to me is the breakdown on what caused the wrongful convictions:

Table of Wrong Convictions

Mistaken identity is by far the worst offender (I talk about the uselessness of human observation capability here). Rather remarkably to me the next worse is perjury. _Those_ people should be in jail, why doesn’t that ever seem to happen? The crux to me, though, are the very high numbers for official misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct is a huge problem for me, not the least because even when ‘convicted’ a prosecutor gets basically no punishment at all (see the asshole Mike Nifong for example). Even at its peak, bad forensics resulted in ‘only’ 37% of the cases. I strongly suspect that the rather low percentage of false confessions has nothing to do with the number of false confessions as it is well known that it is near impossible to get any judge to reconsider your case if you made a sworn confession, no matter how badly beaten you were to get it.

You can read the whole report here (I haven’t): Full PDF of Report.

The registry database is here.