MTBF

2003-09-30

Another techie article from Salon. This time it's an exceedingly breathless article on the Unimaginable New Worlds! destined to arise from nanotechnology.

I'm so sick of these naive scientist jerks. Or worse, the non-scientist followers who treat this stuff like religion and the answer to all their problems.

Just think for a moment, guys: think. A society of highly advanced, nanotechnological, sentient beings is, in many ways, so unremarkable as to be banal. After all, we are currently a society of highly advanced, nanotechnological, sentient beings! And we as a society of beings, have seen fit to commit genocides, invent nuclear weapons, foment terrorism, consign peoples to slavery or starvation or both, and so on and so forth. We have also managed to produce glorious works of art, systems of justice and government, communities based on love or at the very least cooperation. It seems plainly obvious (to me, anyway) that the nanotech society will be precisely the same in these respects. Goldstein thinks maybe we will somehow find the escape hatch for competition by escaping the tyranny of evolution. But he doesn't offer an argument for how that will happen.

The really hard bioethical questions will have, by that time, been answered. That's because we will presumably at that time be building brains, and if we're building brains, then we presumably know how they work, and if we know how they work, we presumably know what's sentient, and it's not knowing what's sentient that causes our thorniest ethical dilemmas today: abortion and animal rights.

On the way to this newfangled world, I am quite sure we will take our nuclear weapons and our starvation and our terrorism to duke it out for the right to decide how this newfangled world will look, and who will get to play, and who will be consigned to obsolescence.

--Melissa O, at 00:12 *  (0) comments

2003-09-27

Truly I cannot believe this. Apparently in the '50s and '60s girls whose growth was projected to be above 5'10" (as if something like that could be predicted reliably) were given estrogen to stunt their growth. Apparently it also stunted their fertility (surprise).

It also stunted their human rights. I'm completely speculating here, but if we went back in time and tried to dissuade these oh-so-well-meaning doctors away from prescribing this treatment, I bet that arguments about patient regret would not resonate nearly as much as arguments about losing fertility. Because what's the point of being attracted to men if you can't have children? Huh?

I could have sworn that once upon a time I read about a place called the Hermione Institute that claimed to provide the same service, only to adult women and by means of surgery. But I've never found another reference to it.

The fact that such treatment is even available is, I suppose, some kind of testament to the real suffering that some women experience. I myself am quite tall, but my anxiety is limited mainly to getting all eyes when I walk into the room (or step on the bus, or walk up to the counter). But my heterosexual friends who are also tall simply cannot date men who are shorter than them, and it's so limiting. Especially three or more inches shorter. (And my straight male friends who are short can't get dates to save their lives.) It really matters, even though it shouldn't.

Which is why it's very interesting that the women who participated in the study seem to concur that they'd rather not have had the treatment, even if it did manage to keep their height closer to so-called normal.

Now I'm just waiting for people to crawl out of the woodwork claiming this as evidence of a tall-person "identity" that is "genetically determined." Lordy lordy lordy.

--Melissa O, at 18:51 *  (0) comments

2003-09-24

Here's why votes can never have an electronic form: they must be human-readable. If they are only machine-readable, then only the people who run the machines know what they are.

Have you ever wondered why big state lotteries pick their numbers on live television with big ping-pong ball blowers? It's not because it makes good theater and they like to show a pretty Vanna clone. It's because with millions of dollars on the line, they have to demonstrate to one and all that the thing is not rigged. They even have the Vanna clone touch the ball so that you know the ball in the close-up frame is the same one as the ball in the machine. The path from the blower to where the ball lands is transparent so that you know it's the same ball and not some preselected ball coming out of nowhere. They count out the balls in public (though not on TV, usually) so you know all the numbers are there. They even have multiple sets of balls, one of which is chosen at random.

Now imagine that the number are chosen instead in the dead of night by a computer run my five guys with scruffy beards. Now imagine five guys wish scruffy beards sunning themselves in Vanuatu with their pay-off money in a numbered account. They may or may not have mai-tais. (And yes, this means that computer slots and video poker machines are probably rigged.)

If someone hands me a smartcard and says "your vote is encrypted here and the public key validates it," they might as well be saying "narf uznook trom ellybelly." I can't validate what the ballot says, and neither can most people. (Well, I probably could, but most people couldn't.)

I want paper ballots counted by hand, in public, at the polling place. If they can't be at the polling place, I want partisan or non-partisan observers with them whenever they are transported. If they can't all be counted by hand, I want a random sample counted by hand (and the precincts to be sampled should be chosen by ping-pong ball & Vanna clone). If they can't be counted in complete public, I want partisan observers present. (BTW, what do you think UN election observers do, anyway?) I'd like them counted on live television, but videotaping the proceedings is probably okay. If you want a fancy-shmancy ATM-style touch screen humdinger to fill in the little ovals for you, that's fine by me. Just as long as it's you putting the paper in the box.

Anything less means handing the election to some guy saying "Trust me, I'm with the goverment. I mean, with Diebold. Well, one of them, anyway."

And if we can't get enough volunteers to do the observing and counting, then our democracy is already sunk.

--Melissa O, at 23:18 *  (0) comments

2003-09-23

In case you were wondering whether to be worried about the Diebold electronic touch-screen voting systems. Farhad Manjoo and Bev Harris lay it all out for you in Salon.

As someone who has worked in Internet security, I will just say that having the central vote counting computers on the Internet is beyond the pale. There is absolutely not reason why those boxes can't be behind a firewall, and their results copied to websites for press reports. If it is true that any joker can walk in from the Internet and change the results and the audit logs then the reliability of all elections using those machines to date is precisely exactly zero.

Because how do you know some extremist activist hasn't been sitting in a bunker somewhere, having stumbled onto these vulnerabilities years ago, tweaking all the results to serve his master plan? Oh, right, I guess we'll just have to CHECK THE LOGS. Oops.

--Melissa O, at 10:04 *  (0) comments

2003-09-22

This analysis at Wampum makes my whole day. MBW is my hero, parsing all those tables of data. I hope she keeps at it.

--Melissa O, at 07:35 *  (0) comments

2003-09-20

I wanted to elaborate a little bit on some ideas from the Salon article from the other day, the one about service jobs being replaced by mechanization.

Some arguments have been made that all this means is that workers will stop being robots themselves and start being robot technicians or something. That is, generally speaking, new opportunities will open up where old ones have disappeared. Yes, that's true, but that's not the point.

Consider a feudal arrangement: rich landowners own all property, while peasants toil endlessly on land they do not own and have no opportunity for owning land themselves. In this arrangement, the landowners allow the peasants to subsist because owning all the land in the world does you no good if you have no one to work it.

With the advent of the robot worker, you don't need peasants anymore. (It's kind of ironic that agriculture is one of the most mechanized industries in the United States.) All you have to do is be rich enough to own capital and the robots to work it. Your workers become capital in a way they haven't been since 1865. This is more than just human workers getting priced out of jobs by robots. It is an ever accelerating decline in the ability of workers with few assets to get ahead and own capital (not consumer goods) of their own. And more fundamentally, it is a degradation of the ethical justification for capitalism: the doctrine of exchange for mutual benefit. How can you participate in the capitalist system if you have nothing to exchange?

This question has always been sort of ethically troublesome for capitalism, but at least you always had the sweat of your brow to offer.

--Melissa O, at 13:12 *  (0) comments

2003-09-18

Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world.

--Melissa O, at 07:33 *  (0) comments

You know what I think?

Salon has an article today about the possibility that most unskilled service jobs will become obsolete, the workers replaced by always improving robots. There was a discussion in Slashdot a while back about this very topic as well. Robert Reich has a few quotes about how this means short-term pain for the suddenly unemployed workers, it opens up the possibility that all may someday work in the allegedly rewarding knowledge, idea, or creative sectors. (Or whatever the buzzword is now.)

That's all very interesting, and fun to speculate about. But what caught my eye was a link to an article in Popular Science about robot heads designed to duplicate human facial expressions. In its obligatory science-writing-human-interest passage, the article alludes to the inventor's prior experience as a sculptor, and attributes his success to this artistic sensibility.

Well, to me that makes perfect sense. What artists do is to wield powerful, unquantifiable intuitions about extremely complicated systems. Most people would be able to tell you whether a robotic human head is lifelike or uncannily "off." A critic of sculpture (or acting) might be able to tell you the whys and hows of its success or failure. But only the artist will be able to complete the final step, which is to solve the problem of making something convincing out of what is essentially clay. By the time the computer scientists have that quantified and figured out--well, the job of "computer scientist" will already have gone the way of the automated supermarket cashier.

--Melissa O, at 06:14 *  (0) comments

2003-09-16

Is this thing on?

--Melissa O, at 07:01 *  (0) comments