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Monday, November 11, 2002
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Interesting weekend. We had a big winter storm hit California. I live on the west coast and can see the Pacific Ocean from my living room. We lost power for approximately 30 hours. I spent a lot of time in the dark thinking about appropriate energy use in a sustainable future. More on that later. Meanwhile elsewhere on the SynEARTH network ....
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Matthew Riemer writes: Americans trudge to the polls proudly each election and inevitably vote for the "lesser of two evils." Candidates are weeded out from a gaggle of wealthy, former/current businessmen who are now exchanging the corporate world for the governmental one, a shift that is quite natural considering that the government is a business itself intimately linked with the largest corporations on the planet, who along with various government institutions determine the health of the economy and therefore the mood and well-being of the general population. The candidates are mere actors who spend most of their time reciting platitudes from history's tired list, insulting one another's character, and making promises that are literally impossible to keep. Behind the scenes, behind the smoke and mirrors, they comprise the unified ruling class. Where they disagree is where the party lines are drawn. Whether we vote Democrat or Republican, we are voting for those beholden to free market capitalism. Globalization and its bodyguard, the U.S. military, win every election. (11/11/02) | |
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Marvin Minsky writes: Why don't we yet have good theories about what our minds are and how they work? In my view this is because we're only now beginning to have the concepts that we'll need for this. The brain is a very complex machine, far more advanced that today's computers, yet it was not until the 1950s that we began to acquire such simple ideas about (for example) memory—such as the concepts of data structures, cache memories, priority interrupt systems, and such representations of knowledge as 'semantic networks.' Computer science now has many hundreds of such concepts that were simply not available before the 1960s. Psychology itself did not much develop before the twentieth century. A few thinkers like Aristotle had good ideas about psychology, but progress thereafter was slow; it seems to me that Aristotle's suggestions in the Rhetoric were about as good as those of other thinkers until around 1870. Then came the era of Galton, Wundt, William James and Freud, and we saw the first steps toward ideas about how minds work. But still, in my view, there was little more progress until the Cybernetics of the '40s, the Artificial Intelligence of the '50s and '60s, and the Cognitive Psychology that started to grow in the '70s and 80s. Why did psychology lag so far behind so many other sciences? (11/11/02) | |
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New York Times Magazine -- What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham. We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When's the last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn't count.) Except for our pets, real animals -- animals living and dying -- no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well. Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians. (11/11/02) | |
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Yahoo! News -- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush has given broad authority to "a variety of people" in his administration to launch attacks like the missile strike that killed six suspected al Qaeda operatives in Yemen last week, his national security adviser said on Sunday. ... Human rights group Amnesty International wrote to Bush on Friday to question Washington's role in the attack. "If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law," the London-based rights group in a statement. Amnesty called on the United States to issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it does not sanction extra-judicial executions. Rice seemed to reject that call on Sunday. "I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here," she said when asked if such killings violated U.S. or international law. The president is "well within the bounds of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority," Rice said. (11/11/02) | |
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BBC Science -- Political manoeuvring is seriously undermining efforts to protect some of the world's rarest animals and plants, according to delegates at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. ... World Wildlife Fund's Sue Leverman describes the process: "Unfortunately, we're seeing tremendous politicisation of the discussion between governments as well, and the level of political wheeling and dealing and trading on the decisions is worse than I've ever seen at any Cites conference previously." The trouble is that there are billions of dollars at stake here. Wildlife smuggling is the world's third-largest illicit trade behind drugs and weapons. ... But it is not just about money - governments have powerful domestic political lobbies behind some of the proposals. That is why, according to the deputy head of Kenya's delegation, Paula Kahumbu, tremendous amounts of political weight gets tossed around: "Japan wanted support, not only for its whale proposals, but Japan is trying to block all proposals here to deal with fish, including sea horses," she said. The Japanese deny any wrongdoing, insisting that all they are guilty of is good old-fashioned lobbying to make their views heard above the din of the environmentalists. (11/11/02) | |
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BBC Science -- New research has shown that the forest fires which ravaged South East Asia five years ago caused a massive increase in levels of the greenhouse gases which are blamed for global warming. Scientists from Indonesia and Europe believe that between 0.8 and 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon entered the atmosphere after the fires in Indonesia - contributing to the biggest annual increase in carbon emissions since records began. Almost a million hectares of forest were destroyed in the fires, mainly in Borneo and Sumatra, which produced a choking smog across much of southeast Asia. ... The scientists, whose research is published in Nature, also found that most of the carbon did not come from the burnt trees but from smouldering deposits of peat. Tropical peatlands store huge amounts of carbon which, the scientists say, could be released by forest fires in the future. "Carbon dioxide is known to be responsible for the global warming of the atmosphere of the Earth," said the head of the team of scientists, Dr Susan Page, from the University of Leicester in the UK. (11/11/02) | |
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Soldiers entered six houses in their search for Naser Abu Aliz, yet another one of the thousands of wanted men in Palestine. The IOF began by blowing up his front door to gain entry into the house, and continued by exploding a second door inside. They found the house empty, but ransacked it, nonetheless, damaging or destroying nearly everything. They then went to his brother's house, Jilal Al Jabaji, and blew off his door. The soldiers ransacked his house as well, and even fired live ammunition while the parents and children, a 6-year-old and an 8-month-old infant, witnessed these actions, literally terrified. The flood of children's tears moistening a mother's shirt and the echo of their screams ring in their parent's ears, waking..... Another house, that of Mamoud Abu Sada had five people inside when the IOF calmly and precisely blew off its door. Three children, one 7, one 5 ½, and one 2 ½ years old, screamed and cried when the bathroom door was blown up, the tiles destroyed, their big table ruined; they all riveted in panic from the shooting inside their supposed sanctuary, watching dark shadows holding M-16's aimed, shooting, invading their rooms and then running on to.... The next home where the soldiers found Iyad Itiyim, his wife and 8-month-old baby. They ransacked the house, fractured the walls with their 'routine' explosions and shot bullet holes in a dresser that we ran our fingers across this morning. (11/10/02) | |
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Ray Kurzweil writes: I want to propose a case that intelligence — specifically human intelligence, but not necessarily biological human intelligence — will trump cosmology, or at least trump the dumb forces of cosmology. The forces that we heard discussed earlier don't have the qualities that we posit in intelligent decision-making. In the grand celestial machinery, forces deplete themselves at a certain point and other forces take over. Essentially you have a universe that's dominated by what I call dumb matter, because it's controlled by fairly simple mechanical processes. Human civilization possesses a different type of force with a certain scope and a certain power. It's changing the shape and destiny of our planet. Consider, for example, asteroids and meteors. Small ones hit us on a fairly regular basis, but the big ones hit us every some tens of millions of years and have apparently had a big impact on the course of biological evolution. That's not going to happen again. If it happened next year we're not quite ready to deal with it, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen next year. When it does happen again our technology will be quite sufficient. We'll see it coming, and we will deal with it. We'll use our engineering to send up a probe and blast it out of the sky. You can score one for intelligence in terms of trumping the natural unintelligent forces of the universe. (11/10/02) | |
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A great place to read about the work of Buckminster Fuller. I just wish there were more pictures. (11/10/02) | |
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6:21:38 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
12/3/2002; 8:09:12 AM.
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