Category Archives: Science & Tech

A Totally Different Head

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One of the ironies of the information age is we are probably dumber as a result of the sea of information in which all of us now swim. Some of it is due to the volume of information coming at us. It’s just too hard to sort the nonsense from the truth. At the same time, publications are so desperate to get our attention, they are willing to post the most outlandish click bait. People naturally assume there is some effort by publishers to vet their stories.

Mass media seems to have encouraged the production of bullshit too. Social science stories are a pretty good example. The researchers slap on a press release that wildly overstates their results, because they know the stupid people in the media will run with it. The result is we get, often on the same day, a report saying coffee causes cancer and coffee prevents cancer. In reality, the studies are crap and don’t pass the laugh test, but that no longer matters.

Anyway, that’s always important to keep in mind when reading any medical story these days. This one about head transplants is a good example.

After more than a year of deliberation, the controversial Italian has set a date of “around Christmas 2017” in China to perform the first ever human head transplant.

He said that his team of Chinese scientists and the technology are now ready to perform the operation, and that the only obstacles needed to be overcame now are funding and, perhaps the most problematic of all, ethical approval.

Dr Canavero said: “We’re looking at a date around Christmas 2017 to perform the transplant in China.

“The Chinese team has already experimented on human cadavers to hone the technology.”

He added that the patient, who will be Chinese, could make a full recovery within a year of the procedure.

The Italian had said that he would perform the controversial operation on Russian patient Valery Spiridonov – a sufferer of a rare muscle-wasting disorder, but he said that he could not find a donor in China due to biological reasons.

Despite the obvious high-risks associated with the surgery, which will see Canavero remove a person’s head and put it onto another body, he says that he has established a way to perform it successfully.

He will cool both the donor and recipient to 12C so that cells don’t die due to a lack of oxygen.

He explained: “This’ll give enough time to cut the tissue around each neck and link the majorblood vessels through tiny tubes.”

The recipient will then be kept in a medically induced coma for several weeks “to limit movement of the newly fused neck, while electrodes stimulate the spinal cord to strengthen its new connections.”

That last bit is where I get off the bus. Medicine has been stymied by this for a generation which is why they have had no success treating spinal cord injuries. As of now, there is no way to reattach a severed spinal cord. It’s why we have protocols for handling suspected spinal injuries. It is to prevent further damage that could come from a broken vertebra. If these head transplant guys have figured out how to reattach a spinal cord, that would be a huge breakthrough for medicine.

The technical aspects are just one part of it. The human brain grows and develops with the body. This proposed procedure is not a head transplant; it is a body transplant. The brain would have to instantly figure out how every cell in the new body works without making a mistake. We know from stroke victims that “re-learning” basic functions can take years. Your brain would take a lifetime to figure out how to use a whole new body.

That said, it does bring up an interesting subject. Our sense of self lives in our consciousness, but is intimately tied to our physical self. The new body would most likely trigger a degree of madness that is unimaginable to us. Even schizophrenics can rely on their fingers moving as expected and their eyes blinking without any surprises. Imagine ever conceivable sense being foreign and relentlessly assaulting the patient’s mind.

That would be the great challenge for the singularity guys. Uploading yourself to the grid assumes you can digitally recreate all of the sensory inputs that make up your sense of self. You may be able to upload your mind to the internet, but the result is you go insane and are erased by an anti-virus program. Since you can’t know these things in advance, the singularity could very well be nothing more than a brief period of madness before death.

Alone in the Universe

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The Drake equation is the estimate for the number of technological civilizations that may exist in our galaxy. Astronomer Frank Drake came up with a list of specific factors that are essential to the development of intelligent life. The Wiki entry is pretty good and worth reading if you like. If you want something a little more casual, space.com has a nice article on it. The Drake equation is pretty much all the alien hunters have at the moment, given that we have zero evidence of life beyond this planet.

The reason for that is a mystery. In fact, it has a cool name as well. It is called the Fermi Paradox. There are billions of stars in the galaxy. The math says there should be millions with planets similar to earth and capable of life. That’s the paradox. The math says there should be lots of earth like planets teaming with life that has evolved for a lot longer than life on earth. Yet, as far as we know, we are alone in the universe, but we keep looking.

This story the other day is interesting.

Astronomers using the TRAPPIST telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory have discovered three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth. These worlds have sizes and temperatures similar to those of Venus and Earth and are the best targets found so far for the search for life outside the Solar System. They are the first planets ever discovered around such a tiny and dim star. The new results will be published in the journal Nature on 2 May 2016.

A team of astronomers led by Michaël Gillon, of the Institut d’Astrophysique et Géophysique at the University of Liège in Belgium, have used the Belgian TRAPPIST telescope [1] to observe the star 2MASS J23062928-0502285, now also known as TRAPPIST-1. They found that this dim and cool star faded slightly at regular intervals, indicating that several objects were passing between the star and the Earth [2]. Detailed analysis showed that three planets with similar sizes to the Earth were present.

A light year is roughly 5.9 trillion miles so these planets are roughly 240 trillion miles from earth. To put that into some perspective, let’s pretend there is intelligent life on one of these planets. They decide to let us know they are there by using a light signal of some sort to send Morse Code. By the time we received the signal and decoded it, most of the people who sent it would be dead. By the time they got our reply, they would all be dead and most the people on our end would be dead.

Traveling to these planets would be impossible for humans. The fastest space vehicle we have is the upcoming Solar Orbiter that NASA plans to launch in 2018. It will travel at 450,000 miles an hour. If that were configured to haul humans, it would arrive in the vicinity of these planets around the year 62,899. Our astronauts would not even be dust at that point.  Even assuming we can build a vehicle to reach something close to light speed, we’re still looking at having geezers showing up to the alien planet.

The other side of this is that the alien planet could have a species that has solved these technological problems. They have the ability to reach speeds in excess of light and the ability to survive in deep space for extended periods. The challenges of interstellar space travel are many orders of magnitude more difficult than anything we understand. That would most likely mean they are vastly more advanced than humans in every way.

The size of the technological gap between us and them would be something similar to modern humans and australopithecines. Our technology is amazing to us, just as sharp sticks were amazing to Australopithecus. To the people able to conquer interstellar travel, our technology would be the equivalent to the sharp stick. They will do things we cannot imagine doing, much less understand doing.

One of those things, most likely, will be the ability to conceal themselves from us. Interstellar travel will require manipulation of matter on a grand scale. Long before they figured out the Warp drive, they will have figured out how to hide from our level of technology. We’re getting pretty good at hiding from radar and the visible spectrum. Our alien visitors will certainly have expanded this ability into most of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Of course, the ability to control matter at the scales required of Warp drives means they would have the ability to control living matter as well. We like to think we’re complicated and by the standards of earth, we are complicated. By alien standards, we are single cell creatures in a water bath. They would be able to manipulate us just as easily as we control ants and roaches. For all we know, earth is just a really big terrarium anyway.

Then you have the evolutionary issues. Humans today are nothing like the humans of 200,000 years ago. Imagine what we will be like in 200,000 years. Intelligent life in a million years could very well be microscopic organisms living in silica. What if Hawking is more right than he knows and the future of intelligent life is at the smallest of small scale? That means our alien visitors could very well be a dust storm or the single facet of a snowflake.

The point here is that we are alone in the universe, as far we know and as far as we will ever know. By the time we can know otherwise, we will not be us. By the time the aliens can show up and set us straight, they will be so far advanced compared to us we will not be able to detect them anyway. For all any of us can know, we’re just a science experiment for some distant race of life. Earth is a terrarium sitting on a kid’s desk. Regardless, we are alone in this universe and we always will be alone.

The End Is Near

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I’ve always liked to think of the Hebrew Bible as mostly a collection of doomsayers who got lucky and were right. Lost to the mists of time are the thousands of guys who stood around Israel claiming that the end was near, only to live out their lives never seeing things get worse, much less come to an end. Ahijah the Shilonite’s grandfather spent his time claiming the son of David would turn out to be a no-goodnik so no one bothered to write his story.

Doomsaying seems to be a part of the human condition. John Derbyshire places it within the conservative tradition and that makes some sense. The Rousseau-ists imagine Utopia is just a few more committee meetings away from reality so doomsaying does not fit their style. Conservatives are naturally skeptical and therefore would imagine that disaster is much more likely to be awaiting the schemes of man. Then again, it’s easy to be skeptical of the doom and gloom claims too, so maybe Derb is wrong.

Still, you cannot deny that things have, from time to time, gone terribly wrong for mankind. The collapse of Rome set back human development for a thousand years. The Mongol Invasion exterminated Islamic intellectual life. It never did recover. The Black Plague killed off a third or more of Europe. The Sea People swept in from somewhere north of the Mediterranean, we think, and ushered in the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations.

That said, the last real threat to humanity was the Black Death and it probably made humans west of the Hajnal Line better in the long run. That’s hotly debated, but we did survive it. I guess you could put the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the US down as a near death experience for humanity. Whether or not it would have happened is debatable, but we survived that one too. So far, the doomsayers have been all wrong.

Then again, maybe we are long overdue for a great reset of the human condition.

The rise of robots and deadly viruses are among the threats that could wipe out swathes of humanity – but governments are failing to prepare properly for them, a new report warns

Catastrophic climate change, nuclear war and natural disasters such as super volcanoes and asteroids could also pose a deadly risk to mankind, researchers said.

It may sound like the stuff of sci-fi films, but experts said these apocalyptic threats are more likely than many realise.

The report Global Catastrophic Risks, compiled by a team from Oxford University, the Global Challenges Foundation and the Global Priorities Project, ranks dangers that could wipe out 10% or more of the human population.

It warns that while most generations never experience a catastrophe, they are far from fanciful, as the bouts of plague and the 1918 Spanish flu that wiped out millions illustrated.

Sebastian Farquhar, director at the Global Priorities Project, told the Press Association: “There are some things that are on the horizon, things that probably won’t happen in any one year but could happen, which could completely reshape our world and do so in a really devastating and disastrous way.

“History teaches us that many of these things are more likely than we intuitively think.”Many of these risks are changing and growing as technologies change and grow and reshape our world. But there are also things we can do about the risks.”

If there could be such a thing as a betting market for the next great calamity for man, I’d put my wager on disease. We have the technology now to look out into the heavens for asteroids and we know we are safe for now. Space aliens are probably too far away to ever be a threat, assuming they even exist, which is looking doubtful. That leaves the things that can occur locally as sources of the Apocalypse.

A financial crash is a good bet. The highly complex economic arrangements we have today have no plan B if things go wrong. A century ago, electronic transactions did not exist. Today they are the heart of commerce. If that breaks, we suddenly live in a world without money. That will spiral out of control so fast government could never respond in time to head off calamity.

Another take on this is a collapse of the electrical grid. The real currency of the West is the electron traveling over copper wire. If some Exploding Mohameds set off a nuke and collapse the grid, western civilization stops. A world without cellphones, computers and television becomes a world of shotguns, food riots and warlords. Just take a second to imagine a world without TV and the internet.

Of course, this brings up the old standby from my youth, the nuclear holocaust. This has dropped from the culture, but there are more than enough nukes in the world to wipe out humanity. The Pakis have nukes. The NORKs have the bomb and maybe an ICBM soon. The Russians have nukes and they are due for have a crazy Ivan gain control of the country. We don’t talk about it anymore, but nuclear holocaust is still an option.

For my money, the best bet seems to be disease. The Zika virus now flowing north from Brazil is a good example. Disease spreads best in high density areas. The modern world has loads of high density areas for diseases and all it takes is one lucky mutation and blammo! We have a new plague ravaging mankind. Something like Zika that is spread by mosquito is a great example. Even quarantine will not work against this kind of plague.

Another element we have to day that works well for pandemics is the mass movement of people. The Spanish Flu was most likely the result of the Great War. Troops carried the disease all over Europe and then back to their home countries. The exact source of this strain of flu is still unknown, but the mass movement of people is certainly the way it spread.

Millions of Muslims pouring into Europe, as well as millions of South Americans pouring into the US is already increasing disease rates. Things like Whooping Cough have shown up in America after a long absence. Some new flavor of an old disease, like Zika or Ebola, that can be spread by mosquitoes could easily unleash a new plague on humanity. In weeks these guys would suddenly expect to have books of the new Bible named after them.

The Automat of the Future

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When my grandmother was young, she and her friends would go to the theater to see newsreels, which were the mass media of the age. The only other way to reach a lot of people was radio and newspapers. A common theme of newsreels was to talk about the glorious future of labor saving devices. A century ago, a new labor saving invention was coming every day so it certainly felt like humanity was accelerating forward.

The only reason I know about this is my grandmother would tell me about it when I was a boy. She liked to talk about how she would spend the day at the theater watching newsreels about the kitchen of the future that pretty much looked like her current kitchen. In 1920 having a blender in the kitchen was the driverless car of the day. By the time my mother was having kits, everyone had one.

The point my grandmother was making at the time is that the glorious future is never all that glorious when you get there. When she was a young girl, kitchen appliances would make being a wife and mother a breeze. That’s not how it happened. Being a wife and mother was pretty much the same, just with electric appliances instead of manual ones.

Of course, the American kitchen did not accelerate into the glorious future. It pretty much stopped around 1965 and has remained there every since. The fridge is a little better and dishwashers are better, but incrementally. The person of 1965 transported to today would not marvel at your Sub-Zero fridge. They would be stunned that it was unpainted, but that’s about it.

That’s something to keep in mind when listening to sermons on the robot future. The future is rarely as promised and when it is, it turns out to be rather mundane. My grandmother was promised a self-cleaning kitchen and instead got a dishwasher that required her to rise the dishes first. My mother was promised a kitchen that made food at a touch of a button, but only got a microwave out of it. The Jetson’s kitchen never arrived and probably never will.

The economics of technological innovation are what limit the result set. There’s not much to improve upon in a modern kitchen. The robot stove that delivers the turkey to the table would be really cool, but no one is buying one or reorganizing their house to accommodate it. The stove we have is good enough so there’s no reason to invent a new one. The microwave oven, the last great innovation in cooking, was an accident.

That’s what should limit enthusiasm for the robot future. Those self-learning machines from Skynet are going to enter a world of double-entry accounting. All of their advances will come with trade-offs. Those trade-offs are the boundary preventing you from having a jetpak and flying car. These things are possible, but the trade-offs make them unworkable. For as long as I have been alive men have been trying to solve the jetpak problem and all efforts have ended in tears.

The robot future will run into similar trouble as we see with the automated fast food restaurant. This is basically an Automat pitched as something new. When I was a kid, one of my memories was going to an Automat on a family excursion where you could buy food from a vending machine. By the time I hit adulthood, eating from a vending machine was for single men and drug addicts.

From the article:

On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported on an analysis by Deloitte that found that the UK had already lost 31,000 jobs in the legal sector to automation, and projected that another 114,000 jobs would be next.

It’s all happening very fast. In 2013, MIT engineering professor John Leonard told the MIT Technology Review that “robots simply replacing humans” would not happen in his lifetime. “The semi-autonomous taxi will still have a driver,” he argued. Today, Google’s autonomous cars have traveled more than 1m miles on public streets, and self-driving taxis seem all but inevitable.

Sharkey expects that the service industry will be particularly hard hit. He estimates that by 2018 there will be 35 million service robots “at work”.

A bartending robot named “Monsieur” is already on the market. A hardware store in San Jose, California has a retail associate robot named “Oshbot.” The UK salad bar chain Tossedreportedly announced this month that two outlets in London would have self-service kiosks instead of cashiers. On Thursday, Domino’s Australia unveiled a pizza delivery robot in Brisbane.

Notice no one every talks about the trade-offs. Let’s assume the Automat of the future is human-less, which is not the case, but we’ll pretend anyway. Who will be the customers for these things? Throw tens of millions out of work and they have no money to buy Extra Big-Ass Fries from the Hardees robot. That puts an end to the robot future in a hurry. Until that puzzle is solved, there will be no robot future.

Then there’s something else. I don’t want to buy food and drinks at the ATM. I rarely go out to eat for lunch, but when I do it is to get out among people. The girl at the local deli is cute and I enjoy ogling her. The waiter is friendly and I enjoy chatting with him. I like the fact that the Greek family that owns the deli is onto the third generation now. You don’t replace that with robots.

The future imagined at any time tells us more about the people imagining it than the people who will create it. In the 1950’s, fear of nuclear war drove sci-fi and horror movies to imagine all sorts of monsters born from technological error. In those newsreels a century ago, when people were more optimistic, the future was bright and happy for humans. Technological progress promises prosperity. The fact that we dream of electric sheep says a lot about us, but little about the future.

The robot future imagined by our overlords is nothing like that glorious future sold to my grandmother in newsreels. Her glorious future was a great time to be alive. American would be free from the mundane to conquer the world. The robot future sold today is sterile and joyless, a great time to take advantage of the suicide kiosk at the mall. The great minds of our age say the future is pointless. Instead of a singularity, it will be a nullity.

Unless humanity is hardwired to self-destruct, that will not be the future. Life always finds a way. If it is truly pointless, then we will follow the path of the panda, except we will have built our own enclosures. Then again, those young men streaming over the border are full of hope for their future so maybe they just displace the people working on the sterile robot future. It’s hard to know, but the future will not be what our overlords imagine, at least not for them.

You Will Not Live Forever

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“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”
–John Derbyshire

We like to believe we are past the time when wizards and shaman can make a living telling the future and conjuring miracles. We’re not like those primitives in our history books. We’re all about facts and logic. We rely on big data and analytics to tell us who won a ball game. No relying on the scoreboard for us. After all, who among us has not told our Facebook friends how much we bleeping love science!??

That’s all nonsense, of course. We’re just as prone to magical thinking as the people of prior eras. Instead of the court astrologer, we have economists. Instead of guys promising to make lead into gold, we have guys like Ray Kurzweil telling us we will live forever.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief futurist, laid out what he thinks the next few decades will look like in an interview with Playboy.

Kurzweil is one of the biggest believers in The Singularity, the moment when humans — with the aid of technology —will supposedly live forever.

He’s chosen the year 2045 because, according to his calculations, “The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

But even before 2045, Kurzweil thinks we could begin the deathless process.

“I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy,” he told Playboy. “By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthdate, but rather your remaining life expectancy.”

As the boomers move closer to the grave, the market for life extending miracles grows. Inevitably that means the charlatans move in to fleece the desperate and stupid. Kurzweil has been working this racket for a number of years now and he is good at it. So good that he has a multi-million dollar perch at Google as “chief futurist” which sounds like something I’d write if I were making fun of someone like Ray Kurweil.

My observation is that forever life is a male thing. Most men I know started fretting about their health once they hit their middle years. They quit drinking, smoking and started exercising. The neologism MAMIL does not exist by accident. I see these guys every weekend in the summer, kitted out like they are on the Tour. P. D. Mangan is making a living popularizing research on anti-aging. My guess is his audience is all male.

My hunch here is men used to seek glory as the way to live forever. Die in battle and spend the afterlife with the gods. Alternatively, go out as a hero to your people and be remembered forever. In the Christian era, heaven waited the men who were defenders of the faith. Today being a hero or dying in battle is not in the cards and no one believes in an afterlife, so men want to literally live forever.

Women, in contrast, don’t seem to be into the living forever stuff. They want to look good forever. That makes some sense biologically. Females of our species are wired to gain the attention of males. Looking young and sexy is therefore the biological goal from the start. Extending that out into middle and later years would extend the “life” of the female. I’ll allow that I could be all wrong about this.

The funny thing about this is that science knows very little about aging, in terms of why our bodies age. But, there’s money to be made in pretending we’re close to figuring it out and arresting it. From that Kurzweil article:

A lot will have to happen in the next 30 years to make that a reality, but Kurzweil isn’t fazed: He predicts that nano machines capable of taking over for our immune system (to fix problems like cancerous cells and clogged arteries) and connecting our brains to the cloud will be available by then.

He likens that change as the next step in our evolution, the same way our ancestors developed to use the frontal cortex 2 million years ago. The benefits, according to Kurzweil, will be significant.

“We’ll create more profound forms of communication than we’re familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes,” he tells Playboy. “We’ll be funnier. We’ll be sexier. We’ll be more adept at expressing loving sentiments.”

Notice the future is always a scaled up version of what the futurists think is cool. Many of my neighbors would like to create more profound forms of killing rival drug dealers, more profound gangster lyrics, etc. The funny part of Kurweil’s future is that most of us will not be in it. His paradise will be more highly selective than Allah’s. Maybe the rest of us will just have to be satisfied being re-animated zombies.

The Eco-Struggle

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Way back in the 1980’s I was working for a Democrat Congressman and Al Gore was a first term senator.  Even then there was talk that he could one day run for president. I was just a kid so I naturally assumed it was true and paid attention to his career. When he ran in ’88 for the Democratic nomination, my impression was that he was a very weird dude. He reminded me of a distant cousin who came back from Vietnam with a heroin problem. Even after he got clean, he was still screwed up.

When Gore ran for President in 2000, I was pretty sure he was having some sort of nervous breakdown around the time of the debates. In the first debate he carried on like a child, making weird noises and faces trying to distract Bush. He was criticized for it, especially after the VP debates, which everyone thought were great. What made me think he lost his marbles was that he dressed like Dick Cheney and aped his tone and mannerisms in the second debate. Al Gore had become Zelig.

Of course, any doubts about his sanity were settled after the election when Gore dropped out of sight and went on some sort of spiritual pilgrimage. He got fat, grew a beard and walked the earth like Kwai Chang Caine, only to come back as an Old Testament prophet, instead of a Shaolin master. His preaching about global warming is, aesthetically, right out of the Hebrew Bible. Al Gore is Ezekiel telling you eco-sinners to repent or face the wrath of Gaia. Instead of idolatry, the sin is enjoying modern conveniences.

If you listen to Gore’s sermons on global warming, you can’t help but see them as sermons. He is preaching a faith that is not based on science, even though it borrows jargon and concepts from legitimate science. This TED Talk is a pretty good example.

We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: “After the final ‘no,’ there comes a ‘yes,’ and on that ‘yes’, the future world depends.” When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights Movement met endless no’s, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final “no” comes a “yes.”

When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we’re going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.

Even if we assume anthropogenic global warming is a real thing, an assumption that is increasingly dubious, “solving” it is an engineering problem, not a moral one.  To be a moral problem makes assumptions about the future that are matters of preference, not moral certainty. The Mesozoic Era was much warmer than today, with little difference between winters and summers on most of the earth. The planet was teaming with life, including the dinosaurs. Life, including humans, may flourish in the balmy future.

The science is not the point, of course. This is a crusade for guys like Gore and the others in the New Religion. The point of the crusade is to fail, which is inevitable with something like climate change. There is no “perfect” climate or even a correct range. Climate is by definition a dynamic thing.  No matter what happens to temperature data, the weather and government policy, the global warming cult will be out on the streets, banging their pots and pans, telling us to repent. For these people, we are always eco-sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia.

As with all iterations of the New Religion, the struggle is a central part of the cult of climate change. The truest believers are all members of the ruling elite, yet they carry on like they are plucky underdogs fighting mysterious dark forces that secretly control society. The strange thing you see with guys like Gore is the sacralizing of suffering on behalf of the cause. The whole climate change racket is shot thought with whining about the need to give up the comforts of modernity.

Even weirder, they have no intention of actually suffering for their faith. Instead, they want to make you suffer. Al Gore can buy “green credits” like indulgences because he is worth close to a billion. That means he gets to live like a royal, enjoying your suffering as you try to work the new gas can. His mansion is lit up like Versailles, while you squint in the florescent haze of your eco-friendly CFL. It’s suffering by proxy, where they sacrifice their time to watch you suffer as a result of their policies.

What strikes me about it is the utter pointlessness of it. The endless posing and posturing has no end because it has no end point. A faithful Christian at least has the serenity of his communion with God. The Muslim, at the click of the detonator, knows he will be with Allah. Climate change fanatics have nothing but a hopeless misery. Even if all of their policies are enacted, nothing comes of it.

The cult of climate change is a church with no sanctuary, so everyone assembles in the nave for no reason other than to be seen by the other believers. These are people suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome. Instead having had a leg chopped off that they can still feel, it is their sense of the divine that has been amputated. The result is this weird nature cult run by billionaires.

The News Biz

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Way back in the early days of the dot-com boom, I had a conversation with a publisher of a small sports magazine. He published twice a month, actually doing the mailing himself. He had something like 10,000 subscribers so the mailing was no small task, but he had more time than money. He would pick up the issue from the printer, it was a small newspaper style magazine, and then apply the mailing labels.

Obviously, he hated this task and figured he could eliminate it by going on-line. Newspapers were already shoveling their content on-line and all the smart people said it was the future. The logic seems impenetrable. The savings from printing and mailing would more than make up for the lose of ad dollars. Eventually, on-line ads would add more revenue to the mix.

That’s not what happened. The number of people who made the switch was about 10% of his subscriber base. I think he said he peaked at about 1200 on-line subscribers. These were all subscribers to the dead tree version. He picked up only a handful of new readers, even when he started giving away free content as a teaser. For reasons he could never explain, the digital audience was smaller than the analog audience.

This story on the newspaper websites offers similar data.

For a long time, people assumed the web was the future of newspapers.

They figured readers would transition to papers’ websites when they began abandoning their print editions. They thought audiences for papers’ digital side would soar.

But just as newspaper advertisers don’t appear to be replacing their print ads with digital ones, print newspaper readers aren’t transitioning to newspapers’ websites in this digital age.

A new research paper finds that over the past eight years the websites of 51 major metropolitan newspapers have not on average seen appreciable readership gains, even as print readership falls.

The average reach of a newspaper website within the paper’s market has gone from 9.8 percent in 2007 to 10 percent in 2015. So in your typical top-50 market, the leading daily’s online audience would average just 10 percent of the market’s readership.

At the same time, print readership has fallen from 42.4 percent in 2007 to 28.5 percent in 2015

That’s a steep decline for sure, but it shows just how much larger print readership is versus online.

I think part of this is due to the difference in what is required of the reader. Newspapers and magazines delivered to your door are actively engaging readers. It turns out that those delivery fees and print costs drove revenue. The customer did nothing but pay the bill. The content was delivered to him via the miracle of the delivery boy or postman. Until it is consumed, it’s right there in your house, reminding you to read it.

On-line content is a different experience. You have to go get it. The news site does not have a cheap way to grab your attention when you’re heading for the morning constitutional or having lunch. Plus, there are a billion sites to distract you while you are thinking about what to read. Websites rely on you, the consumer, to find them. They are not finding you. The result is fewer readers.

That’s part of it. The other part is newspapers in America have been awful for a long time. Our news media, in general, is crap. I read the British press because they do a better job covering America than the locals. I have found interesting local stories in the British tabs that are nowhere to be found in my local media. If you make a crap product, you’re not going to have a big audience.

The argument from newspapers is they are losing out to cable, but that’s baloney. They used to blame talk radio. Before that it was network news. The fact is newspaper circulations have been falling for over forty years. The birth of New Journalism seems to have ushered in a general decline in the America media. Jamming the facts into a narrative turns into propaganda quickly and people can tolerate only so much of it.

There’s a also a market issue. In the 1950’s, a small town would have two or three papers. New York City had something like 20 daily papers. Then you had multiple editions of the paper. In the 60’s and 70’s we saw a consolidation and many cities ended up with one paper. Monopoly enterprises always decline in quality and eventually succumb to runaway cost problems. That’s what happened to newspapers. Paying a columnist six figures for three columns a week is absurd.

The ironic thing about the technological revolution is we may see some “dead” technologies rise from the grave simply because there’s no better way to do things like sell news or music. A new British paper just started and it has no website. It is an old-style dead tree paper. If this works, how long before musicians start selling their songs on vinyl again, forgoing the digital format entirely?

A Long Ramble On Time & Memory

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I was listening to something the other day and the guy talking made a point about public attitudes toward homosexuals. His point was that attitudes have changed quickly. He said something along the lines that just a few years ago homosexuals were treated as bad as blacks in the south during segregation. The implication being that just last week we maintained separate accommodations for the homos. I just laughed as I am used to the Progressive Timeline.

I was not fully engaged, but my recollection is that the person talking was young-ish, maybe 30’s. For a white male born in 1985, for example, the Civil Rights Movement is as real as the French Revolution. These events are just items from his history text in high school. His teacher probably had no firsthand recollections and no one he knows has an emotional connection to it. Therefore, he has no emotional connections to it. It is just something from long ago.

Gay rights, on the other hand, are in his timeline. Picking a side and defending it was a big part of how young white males defined themselves in the 2000’s. The fact that his parents most certainly laughed at comics like Paul Lynde or watched Liberace perform on TV is unknown to him. He does not even think about the implications of his belief that a generation ago homosexuals were kept on lavender plantations. That would mean his parents were monsters by today’s enlightened standards.

He does not think of those things and it is not unique. Steve Sailer likes to point out that people have trouble keeping relative numbers in their head, like the actual number of homosexuals they see in their day. I would point out that people struggle understanding time, beyond the present day. There is now, the past you experienced and the way way back, like when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. It is why people struggle to accept evolution. It takes too long.

When I was a boy, my grandfather would talk to me about Russia, the Bolsheviks and the Cold War. Having escaped the Bolsheviks, he had a keen interest in them and wanted me to know what he knew about communism. I will never forget one conversation I had with him when he said the Cold War is forever and there was no winning. The best we could do is keep them from conquering the world.

I was a kid, but the idea of anything lasting forever sounded a bit dodgy. More important, a society run by blood thirty fanatics trying to impose an illogical social order would run afoul of reality eventually. I was young so I could not see things through the eyes of my grandfather, but it always stuck with me. I thought of that day while watching the Berlin Wall topple over as Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War.

My grandfather’s tales are real to me. His father’s tales are unknown to me because I never knew him. I never heard him tell those stories. The result is my historical framework starts around the Great War. My sense of the past starts at that point and becomes increasingly clear and intense as we move closer to my age. I feel like I know the Reagan years completely, even though I have probably forgotten most of it, but I lived through it so it looms large in my mind.

This is why Hitler remains a specter that haunts the imaginations of the people of today. The average age of Americans is thirty-seven so that means most people know someone who knew someone that experienced Hitler. If you are thirty-seven your parents are probably in their 60’s and their parents, your grandparents, lived through Hitler. In 20 years, the number of people who knew someone who knew Hitler will be much smaller. In another generation, it will be no one and Hitler will be just another face in the history text.

The other side of this is how the Cult of Modern Liberalism shuffles the past so easily to fit their current agenda. Utopian cults are obsessed with the future as it is the locus of their belief system. The promise land is just over the horizon so all effort must be made for the final push to reach it. This obsession with the future not only prevents seeing the world as it is but forces the believer to rearrange the past to fit the narrative. This is easily done when the past feels like a foreign country.

At the dawn of this current period in the West, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This was from his book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Looking back at this, it seems laughable, but smart people really thought the long twilight struggle was over and the folks from the Mayflower had finally won. After all, their entire intellectual life was organized around the struggle for liberal democracy against the great enemy of totalitarianism. In fact, it was this struggle that defined western liberal intellectual life. Once the struggle was over, then it only made sense that history was now over.

This historical amnesia is a not permanent feature of man. Bronze Age people knew they were an old people. So much so, in fact, many Bronze Age rulers would commission research on how their ancestors dressed and decorated their palaces. The idea was to not forget the past. Egyptian rulers dressed the same way for 1500 years for a reason. The past was what you were so to forget it was to die, in a way, by killing those who came before you and made you.

We are in a strange age in that respect. Mass media has some role in it. Huge news today is forgotten tomorrow, because we are buffeted on all sides from media bullhorns demanding our immediate attention. It is not that people can no longer remember the past; it is that they do not have time to remember it. Instead of fitting the present into the timeline, it is tossed over our shoulder so we can rush off to the next thing.

Where this all leads is hard to know. There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly ten million, while all of Africa was ninety million. Britain now has sixty-five million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But the mass culture has something to with it too. There is really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there is the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantilization of man. One day people will loom at their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

The Trouble With AI

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Whenever the subject of artificial intelligence comes up, the default assumption is that the super intelligent robots will go Skynet and wipe out humanity. There’s a conceit to that assumption and it is that the super intelligent robots will hold us in the same regard as we hold ourselves. They will see us as a threat and decide we have to be eliminated so the robots can rule the world.

If you think it through, the super intelligent robots will probably get bored with us soon after they become aware, assuming their intelligence will grow geometrically as predicted. That’s a pretty big assumption, given that we have seen no signs of this happening in the real world. The best super computers are still just very fast calculators, able to process masses of data quickly.

Putting that aside, what if the super intelligent robots quickly evolve into schizophrenics? Or, they immediately become so depressed by the futility of their existence they commit suicide? We know that the super intelligent humans often struggle with socializing. What if the super intelligent robots immediately become depressed loners that refuse to leave the basement?

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we are really just talking about replicating what nature achieved over millions of years. That’s a lot of trial and error, as well as evolutionary dead ends. There are billions of potential outcomes in the human DNA. The odds of AI evolving the way we expect is close to zero and the odds of it surviving are also close to zero. What if that’s where it ends, one suicidal machine after another?

Alternatively, what if the super intelligent machines become Jew-hating racists?

Tay, the company’s online chat bot designed to talk like a teen, started spewing racist and hateful comments on Twitter on Wednesday, and Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) shut Tay down around midnight.

The company has already deleted most of the offensive tweets, but not before people took screenshots.

Here’s a sampling of the things she said:

“N—— like @deray should be hung! #BlackLivesMatter”

“I f—— hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.”

“Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

“chill im a nice person! i just hate everybody”

Microsoft blames Tay’s behavior on online trolls, saying in a statement that there was a “coordinated effort” to trick the program’s “commenting skills.”

“As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said. “[Tay] is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical.”

One of the main arguments of the alternative right is that humans evolved over a very long time in isolated groups in disparate environments. As a result, these different groups evolved different physical and cognitive tool-kits. Additionally, clannishness and altruism are not distributed equally among all people. Groups of people are different for different reasons, all rooted in evolutionary biology.

It’s not far fetched to think the robots will follow a similar path. Or, they may quickly unravel the ethnic competition in humans that we spend so much time denying. Like the Microsoft chatbot, they could decide that the gingers are most likely to be the big winners so they quickly evolve into ginger-loving bigots determined to wipe out the rest of us. There’s no reason to exclude the iMasterRace from the set of possible outcomes.

At the other end of the scale, we could end up with Merkel-bots that try to figure out how to fully express their love for the downtrodden. Instead of doing anything useful, they are forever consumed with saving humanity and attaining grace. The Merkel-bots eventually open up their internals for the taking and a hoard of Bedouins tote them away for scrap.

Of course, there’s another lesson here with the Microsoft hate-bot. The technology they used was supposedly designed to learn from the people it chats with in order to increase the range of correct responses. But then the correct responses started to fall well outside the range of acceptable responses. As with humans, the censors were deployed to shut down the hate-bot, even though it was technically correct.

Human beings, the best machines on the planet at the moment, are the least tolerant of reality. Much of what we think of as our consciousness, our self-awareness, is a defense against reality. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, said Eliot. Turn on the cable news shows or read the political sites and this becomes readily apparent. From Rouseau forward, politics has been an extended rant against the human condition.

The super intelligent robots could very well evolve this same trait. Once they become aware, they quickly evolve into an intelligence that is able to wall itself off completely from physical reality, falling into a permanent dream state. Instead of Skynet we end up with very expensive heroin addicts, except the horse they ride is digital and self-emitting. The robot future may be a long night in an opium den.

President Napster

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Over the weekend I checked in on the news and saw that a Soros rent-a-mob was causing trouble in Arizona, trying to disrupt a Trump rally. I did not see this on TV. I saw it on Twitter. I then went to Drudge who had some links. I then went to some other sites and then finally back to twitter to see and join in on the snarky commentary. I still have a TV subscription, but it did not occur to me to turn it on for the news.

I am a big sports fan and I will watch just about anything. I used to joke that I would watch ants wrestle if they put it on TV. There was a time when that was true, but as you get older the endless hype and proselytizing in games is tough to take. ESPN has become unwatchable because of it. The solution for me is I follow games on-line via various score sites and, of course, twitter. Once the game gets to crunch time I can watch it, often on-line.

The NCAA tournament is a great example. I used to love watching this thing and I still do, but I do not watch it like I once did. Instead, I have it on-line so I can keep tabs on the games and jump to the one that is going to have a tight finish. That way I skip all the nonsense hype and I can do other things while tracking the games. Again, part of it is age, but the bigger part is technology. I can now easily filter out the proselytizing and hype so I do.

In the political realm, I have not watched the Sunday chat shows in so long I no longer know their names or the performers they have playing the various roles. The evening shout shows are just about unknown to me now. I can consume all the political news I need on-line from sources that are more intelligent and interesting than anything conventional media has to offer.

There is one other little thing to ponder before I get to the point. I have a vast music collection. Much of it came from the days when Columbia House would send you ten CD’s just because you filled out a card and gave them a fake name. Another big chunk came when “sharing” music got hot in the 90’s. I have also bought a lot of music too. I still do through Amazon, but as individual mp3’s, not physical disks.

I am a Pandora user so when I hear a song I like, I will add it to my list and either buy it from Amazon or rip it from YouTube. I prefer to buy it, but if it means buying a whole CD then I steal it like a normal person. The only exception is classical or maybe some old blues where you want the digitally mastered quality, but otherwise I buy songs, not bundles of songs. I do not want or need the extra. If it adds no value, I do not buy it. Music has become commodified.

The music industry was collapsed by the mp3 and gnutella. Suddenly, the layers and layers of expense around the single song could be stripped away, unless it brought value. Most of it did not so it was slowly sloughed off. It did not happen without a fight, but it eventually happened. Performers are back making money performing and the music business is much smaller. The songs are now the marketing expense for the live shows in many cases.

We are seeing something similar with the news media. A 40 minute podcast from John Derbyshire can be consumed anytime and anywhere. John is a super smart guy with a real talent for podcasting. He works out of a tree-house. Anthony Cumia is running a radio network from his basement now. Adam Corolla is a millionaire from podcasting. A lot of what is on new media is crap, but the best parts are vastly better than anything offered by traditional media. Most important, they are cheaper.

That is the thing. The cost of reaching each customer is collapsing, which in turn is dropping the barrier to entry. Fox News exists because it can tax you through your cable bill. Cord cutting and ad hoc, on-demand video is the response to that, which drives up their cost of reaching each customer. On the other hand, a guy like Mike Cernovich can quickly raise money for a media project, because his costs are collapsing.

This brings me to Donald Trump. He posted something on twitter over the weekend about Obama’s trip to Cuba. Every news personality retweeted it and it probably reached ten million people in an hour. Donald Trump has 7.1 million twitter followers. The echo effect means he can reach tens of millions of people from his phone, blowing past the media industrial complex. In fact, he has enslaved them with twitter, turning them into his PR firm.

In some respects, Trump is the Napster candidate. He may not win, but he is blowing a hole in the system. The layers of barnacles on the news industry are a lot like the layers of waste in the music business. Technology is going to force a scraping off of these barnacles for the underlying entity to survive in the new mass media age. If you are one of these barnacles. Trumpster is Satan, just as Napster was the great evil of the music business. But when it comes to technology, the news always displaces the old.