Category Archives: Science & Tech

Digital Fantasies

Posted on by

America’s Newspaper of Record brings word that Amazon has opened its first bookstore, as in brick-and-mortar bookstore.

The opening of Amazon.com’s first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really “eating the world,” as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011.

In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote:

“Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company — its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its Web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.”

Retail stores are still not strictly necessary, and yet Amazon now has one in Seattle. That’s because the book market has proved less one-dimensional than publishers and sellers feared in 2010 and 2011.

In September, The New York Times revealed that the Association of American Publishers had registered a 10 percent decrease in digital book sales in the first five months of the year and that the number of independent bookstores was actually growing.

The failure of the Great Pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch and sprinkle the children with free eBooks is hardly surprising. I used to go around and around with moonbat friends about this issue as they were all convinced that we would soon be reading everything from a magic tablet. Physical books were old and stuff so of course they serve no purpose.

As is always the case with Utopians and futurists, they naturally assume that because they cannot see the obstacles to their fantasies, those obstacles must not exist. Full steam ahead! In the case of books, the glorious future of eBooks faced the very real obstacle that they were not a very good replacement for real books. They are and remain, a solution in search of a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I consume most writing off a screen. I read a book or two per month, sometimes more sometimes less. I read a ton on-line. It has been so long since I’ve held a newspaper I can no longer remember when. The other day, I was getting coffee and someone asked if they had a newspaper. To me, it sounded like he wanted to know where to tie up his horse.

The thing I was never able to explain to my moonbat friends with regards to eBooks is that books as we understand them, along with bookstores, publishers, writers, editors, layout men, illustrators etc., did not spring from nothing. They evolved over time to solve the problem of quickly and easily distributing content to as many people as possible in a way that profits the people involved in that process. It is not easily replaced.

Movable type was invented in 1040. The printing press was invented 400 years later. In other words, it took 20 generations for there to develop a need for the mass production of printed material and a solution to be developed. We have another 30 generations to get us to the paperback that you can take to the beach. The point being is there is a lot of trial and error in those bodice-rippers you wife reads.

Utopians never think of these things as they think that their inheritance dropped from the sky. They have no appreciation for what they see around them. All they know is the sleek looking iPad is cool and all the cool kids have them so let’s close down the bookstores and make everyone read eBooks. That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the level of thinking. The people betting on eBooks were betting that 50 generations of work could be replaced in a wave of the hand.

I say all this as someone who reads eBooks. I read physical books too, but I also read eBooks when convenient. I re-read Camp of the Saints the other day off my tablet. The book is terrible and I would not display it on my bookshelf so I saved the money and downloaded it. The thing is, I don’t read a lot of books that suck and I tend to make notes in the margins when I read so the physical book works better most of the time.

Further, if I leave a book on a plane or at the beach, no big deal. If the sun melts my tablet, that is a big deal. If I drop my tablet down the steps, that’s a big deal, while dropping a book off the roof costs me nothing. These are things the Progressive mind can never contemplate as they see no value in them, because they see no value in people. My preferences are immaterial to the material mind.

This blinkered reasoning is standard fare these days so I’m an outlier. The physical book was as good as it needed to be and mail order was fast enough and cheap enough. For something to replace this model it had to be different, offering things you could never get in a book like embedded video or multidimensional plot strictures for fiction where every reader get s a slightly different experience. Instead eBooks are just books that make your eyes bleed.

Germs!

Posted on by

This is one of those stories that could be big or it could be a nonsense. The nonsense part is easy. Most medical research is poorly reported by the media. The men and women working at these sites simply lack the IQ to understand the material so they let the researchers write their copy for them. Studies are sent to the media with an executive summary. It is cut and pasted into a “news” story.

The result is a lot of scientific nonsense makes it to the public, but not all of it is bunk. In this case, there’s a growing speculation that germs may play a much bigger role in human health, with regards to issues like heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer disease.

The “seeds” of Alzheimer’s disease may be transmitted from one person to another during certain medical procedures, scientists have found.

A study into people who died of a separate kind of brain disease after receiving injections of human growth hormone suggests that Alzheimer’s may also be a transmissible disease.

The findings have raised questions about the safety of some medical procedures, possibly including blood transfusions and invasive dental treatment, which may involve the transfer of contaminated tissues or surgical equipment.

The investigation has shown for the first time in humans that Alzheimer’s disease may be a transmissible infection which could be inadvertently passed between people.

Scientists emphasised that the new evidence is still preliminary and should not stop anyone from having surgery. They have also stressed that it is not possible to “catch” Alzheimer’s by living with someone with the disease.

However, the findings of a study into eight people who were given growth hormone injections when they were children have raised the disturbing possibility that Alzheimer’s can be transmitted under certain circumstances when infected tissues or surgical instruments are passed between individuals.

Alzheimer disease does not fit well with our understanding of the genome and evolution. What’s known about the disease, and it is quite a lot now, suggests it should strike people of all ages, not just the very old. The most common gene associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease is called apolipoprotein E (APOE). The one form of this gene with the highest correlation to the disease is APOE e4, but having two copies of this gene, one from each parent, does not mean you get the disease. In other words, the correlation is weak.

There are other genes associated with the disease, as we see with many other diseases that turn up in old age. The number of factors associated with the incidence can be quite large. On the other hand, the genome has revealed some interesting associations. Heart disease is the one of the better example as it can be mapped. This map is a great example of how genetics and disease fit together:

If science is beginning to link  a disease like Alzheimer’s to a pathoigen, to use shorthand, it changes the way medicine attacks these diseases. In other words, if exposure to a pathogen triggers certain gene combinations, resulting in the production of a bad protein, science can better predict, but also better treat these diseases. Put another way, genetically linked disorders could still be treated, just at the pathogen level.

Where it can get revolutionary and scary is in the area of human behavior. Homosexuality remains a great scientific mystery. No one knows why some steady percentage of males are homosexual. Genetics could never be the answer as a gay gene would rarely be passed along to the off-spring, since homosexuals have far fewer off-spring. Basic math says the gay gene would have died out long ago. Here’s a nice Jayman post on the topic.

The gay germ theory is controversial as is everything to do with homosexuals, but the implications are not insignificant. If pathogens trigger behavioral traits, then it means behavior could, in theory, be modified medically. Curing things like homosexuality, alcoholism, or simply being a douche bag are suddenly not so far fetched.

No one reading this will live to see the day when you can take a pill for you homosexuality or unpleasant disposition. We’re not going to see the day when genes are altered in order to eliminate disorders. Some alive today will see treatments for common maladies of old age that will allow for more vigorous lives and even longer lives. Curing Alzheimer’s is not that far off. That alone will radically alter a lot of lives.

It’s not all bad news.

Ramblings on Race, Racism and Race Realism

Posted on by

If you live around a lot of diversity, you learn how to recognize others who live around a lot of diversity. It’s like the difference between the world traveler and the provincial who never left home. The change in perspective results in a change in demeanor. I’m comfortable in alien places because I’ve been around a lot of people not like me on a daily basis for a long time. I just don’t think it is strange to be the guy who sticks out like a sore thumb.

One of the things you learn when you spend a lot of time around non-whites is that not all white people are the same. That sounds odd, but it works like this. You get to know a lot of “Hispanics” for example and you quickly see that they are not a singular race and they often don’t speak the same language. Guatemalans are a different breed of cat from Cubans or Dominicans or Mexicans from El Norte. Lumping all these people into the bucket called “Hispanic” is mostly worthless.

That revelation leads to rethinking what it means to be white, black or Asian. Italians and Spaniards are called white, but they are not Germans or Swedes. Travel around America and you see that a place like Indiana is part Yankee New England and part Appalachian hick. The term “Hoosier”, by the way, was an insult for Virginia hillbillies. Head a few clicks north and you are into a different population of honkies altogether.

From an anthropological perspective, the old categories of race are falling apart. If you read Nick Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance, it becomes rather clear that race classifications based on skin tone don’t hold up. It’s better to think of people as belonging to large extended families. There’s lots of cross pollination between these large extended families, but at the edges where they interface. Swedes share a lot with Germans, but very little with Bantus.

The fact is, skin, eye and hair color are just one part of it. There are character differences that are just as rooted in biology as skin color. Those character and personality traits impact culture, which in turn has impacted biology. This article by Peter Frost is a great explanation of how biology, culture and environment work on one another simultaneously. Swedes are built for a culture built for the environment of Sweden, which is different from the Bantus, who were built for a culture built for flourishing in Africa.

The trouble with discussing any of this is that there’s a another part of the puzzle. Humans are built to distrust those who are not their kind. While it is as natural as left handedness, our culture eschews anything that even hints at racism. This is not illogical as we in the West live in multi-ethnic societies. Keeping the peace means suppressing the instinct to not like the “other” or the foreign. The argument from race realists is that you can take this too far and when you do the results are worse than naked racism.

I have no way of knowing if that is true, but I think it is probably time for people calling themselves “race realists” to simply drop the term in favor of something more biologically correct and less provocative. I’ll refer to myself as a biological realist, for example, because I think you cannot overcome biology with wishful thinking. This has the added benefit of handling the feminist lunacies.

“Fixing the schools” is a waste of time because 80% of education is the IQ and character of the student. Another 10% is family life and the rest is the community in which the school exists. Maybe the school has 2% of an impact and I may be generous here. Put the ghetto boys into a nice prep school, but somehow maintain the ghetto home and community life, and you get the same result as you get from the local public school. Maybe one or two end up better than otherwise.

Similarly, the people who left the Borderlands of England for the New World ended up in Appalachia. They recreated their culture from home, without the interference of the Crown. When those people migrated into the Midwest, they recreated their mountain culture in the new lands. Southern Illinois is not like West Virginia by accident. There’s a strong Scandinavian flavor to the upper Midwest for a reason.

It’s why America can never be a land dominated by a central government imposing a universal culture on the whole nation. The differences are simply too big between the people of Vermont and the people of Texas. No amount of hooting and bellowing from Progressive loons will change biology and culture. It’s another area where biological realism could gain some traction. You can shame the Yankee busy-body out of trying to impose his values on the world. Mention race and he loses the ability to feel shame.

That’s why HBD and race realist people need to free themselves from the plain old racists. The people attracted to your movement for the racism are mostly idiots who will cause you nothing but trouble. That and white nationalism is about the dumbest thing going, given the ethnic and cultural diversity among people who call Europe their ancestral home. The crackers from the hills have as much in common with the German low-landers as they do with Arabs.

That said, it’s probably easier said than done. Saying you don’t like black culture is fine, but most people will call you a racist, even if you are married to a black person or are actually black. Racism used to be an action. Then it became words, then thoughts and is quickly becoming a lack of enthusiasm. If you are not enthusiastic enough in your praise for non-whites, you’re called a bigot.

Thinking about it, the image that comes to mind is of a train slamming into a mountain. Whatever distance and uniqueness there is between the cars, the collision eliminates it, leaving a pile of twisted metal. That’s what has happened with public discussion of anything that relates to ethnicity. It’s slammed into the wall of Cultural Marxism and you can no longer tell the racist crackpots from the Progressive loons.

Electric Cars

Posted on by

There’s a fine line between enthusiasm and lunacy. There’s a reason someone coined the term “fan” to describe over the top supporters of sports teams. Some percentage of people become untethered from reality over interest in a subject, like a sports team or even a whole sport. I’ve met college football fans in the South who will talk of nothing but college football.

I’ve always suspected that the same trait responsible for intense religiosity is responsible for intense enthusiasm or devotion to a narrow topic. I have no way of proving it, but that is my hunch. A lot of die hard Communists 100 years ago came from deeply religious families. It’s why Jews were over represented in Leftist causes. People immersed in hobbies often come from parents who were deeply committed to some cause or religion.

Those thoughts always come to mind when I run into electric car enthusiasts. They have the passion of a zealot for something that most people find uninteresting. 90% of people would be fine if a team of midgets were in the engine bay of their car, providing the propulsion. They just want to drive it where they need to go.

The electric car freaks and to a lesser extent the magic energy crowd, obsess over electric motors in the same way crazy old men in another era obsessed over steam engines. They lose themselves in minutiae and spend their free time re-reading details of the future electric car. They also write blog posts so other electric car fans can read and comment about their thoughts on electric cars.

One of the hallmarks of a cult is the adherents are convinced that the promised land is just over the next hill or around the next bend. The prophesies are inevitable and there’s nothing that will alter the future so they spend their time documenting the events leading to the ultimate event. Zero Hedge is a pretty good example. Greece did not blow up the world so they onto other “three key charts before the crash!!” postings.

From that post about electric cars:

Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun. The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars:

I’ve omitted the list and want to focus on the highlighted words. I looked up the sales figured for the Tesla S. In 2015 they have sold 11,600, which sounds pretty good, until you look at the market sales data. So far in the US 5.3 million cars have been sold this year. Tesla has sold well, compared to previous attempts to market electric cars, but that’s hardly an accomplishment.

The Tesla Model S is a toy for a rich guy. It’s a $75,000 car that costs a lot to own, due to the infrastructure needed to charge it. If you live in Marin or Greenwich, it’s a cool status symbol and a fun toy for the weekend. When you blow $20K on a ski weekend, $75K for an electric car is just more grace on the cheap.

The rest of the post has that unhinged vibe that makes you wonder if it is not a put on. This item from his list of great benefits is hilarious to me: “It comes with an app that allows you to manage the car from your phone.” I’m pretty sure I’ve poked fun at people a few times using a line similar to that. “You can control your ice maker from your iPhone!”

The great hurdle for the electric car has been the same for 100 years. That is, how to quickly  and safely store chemical energy in a small container that can be quickly converted to kinetic energy. Gasoline and Diesel are really good for this. Batteries are not very good for this. Right now, the Tesla figures say it takes about ten hours to fully charge their car if it has the twin charger option.

That’s not useful for most people. Driving to work and back is fine, but if you have to go more than 100 miles from home, you’re out of luck. Given that material science has hit a wall in terms of battery design for these things, you can’t assume those charge times will drop quickly. Massive investment has yielded little progress. So much so, Elon Musk has dropped the search for a breakthrough and has invested big in conventional battery production. He’s betting against the breakthrough.

But, there may be a future for electric bikes and scooters. There are firms offering scooters that are fine for tooling around a city or campus and they can be charged quickly. The battery is removable so you can plug it in at school or work. A motorcycle with a 500 mile range and a few hours of charge time is another option that is within the possible.

All of those limits to electric cars have been known for years. The same is true with solar power, by the way. The science moves forward at a snails pace, pushing the day we are free from hydrocarbons further into the future. But, that never stops the fanatics. They are sure that electric cars powered by sunshine are just around the corner. All they need is a few trillion more dollars from the taxpayers…

Better Bring a Jacket

Posted on by

In my lifetime, material progress was the solution to human suffering, the cause of human suffering, the cause of the planet suffering and due to making Gaia angry, the cause of human suffering again. There’s a fair bit of masochism in Western society and its outlet is environmentalism. The Greens really hate people and now they may have some great news. An ice age is on the horizon.

The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the ‘Maunder minimum’ – which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London’s River Thames to freeze over.

The new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat.

It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

‘In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,’ said Zharkova.

‘Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other.

‘We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum”

The Maunder Minimum, as a sidebar explains, “is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.” That corresponds to a period know as the Little Ice Age. It is also the period global warmists exclude from their models since it screws up their predictions.

If you live in Florida, a mild cooling of the climate is great news as it will mean San Diego style weather 12 months a year. If you live in Boston it means you will be shoveling snow in June and learning how to live with 20 foot snow piles in your drive. The good news is you have fifteen years to stock up on ice melt and work on your shoveling technique.

Weight Training

Posted on by

I saw this posted on Maggie’s Farm today.

The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way. There are a few subtle complications — the bar should move up and down the legs in a vertical line over the middle of the foot, the bar should start from a position directly over the mid-foot, and you should keep your back flat when you pull. But that’s really about all there is to it. The deadlift is one of the basic movements of which strength training is composed.

Pulling things off the ground is a part of your human heritage, and bending down to pick them up is what your knees and hips are for. With the bar in your hands and your feet against the floor, your whole body is completely involved in the exercise, which means the deadlift makes the whole body strong. It would be very difficult to invent a more natural exercise for the body than picking up a progressively heavier barbell.

In America, a lot of time and energy is spent lecturing people about their weight, their diet and their lack of exercise. Health clubs, it seems to me, largely exist on people who feel guilty about not exercising. Around the holidays they resolve to get in better shape and join a gym. By March they have stopped going.

The thing that has always puzzled me is why weight training is not offered up as the low-cost and sensible way for people to stay in shape. It’s cheap. A decent setup for at home is a few hundred bucks if you’re sensible. For the typical person, an hour, three nights per week, is enough to stay fit, as long as you’re sensible about the diet.

Instead, it is one exotic exercise regime and fad after another. Weight training, in the minds of most people, is for steroidal meathheads with the IQ of a goldfish. At least that’s how it is presented. The truth is most of those meatheads are pretty smart. They’ve spent years learning biochemistry and physiology. The public perception, however, is that weight training is for morons.

Never Hire a Mentally Disturbed Grifter to Run Your Company

Posted on by

One of my rules of life is to never put a bitter weirdo in charge of anything. People on the fringes usually have a lot of strange new ideas, but they are just as likely to secretly harbor a lot of deep resentments about the core. Barak Obama is the most obvious example. He was a fringe weirdo growing up in elite private schools and that festered into a deep hatred of typical white people.

A corollary to that rule is to never hire a mentally disturbed grifter to run your company.

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao commented this morning about the firing of Reddit Director of Communications Victoria Taylor, a move that has resulted in a very public revolt from users of the site. Pao wrote that the site is working on better tools for its moderators, but it will be a while before those tools are made available. “The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so,” Pao wrote in a comment. She said that Reddit has hired new employees to help build these tools, as well as new employees to engage with the community and its moderators. “We are going to figure this out and fix it,” Pao wrote.Since she was hired in 2013, Victoria Taylor has worked on Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer sessions. She served as the main contact for celebrities and other high-profile figures participating in the sessions, helping to transcribe their answers to users’ questions over the phone. In response to her firing, Reddit moderators have effectively shut down many of the site’s most popular sections.

What’s amazing to me is that anyone would hire this woman in the first place. Her resume screams incompetence and she has a history of suing her employers. The only thing she brings to the job is she is Asian and probably lacks a penis. But, inside the Cult, she must have a lot of piety points, despite being laughed out of court a few months back.

I’m not a Reddit user, but I have looked at it from time to time. It strikes me as another Silicon Valley scam where suckers do all the work and some rich people keep all the profits. The Huffington Post is the best example of how the scam works. They relied on bloggers to provide content while Arianna Huffington kept the proceeds.

That works as long as the people running the scam remember to keep the mark happy. Huffington, like the Gabor sisters, has a strange charm that is very effective at keeping the mark happy. Pao is just a stupid twat focused on small time hustles. Putting her in charge of a sophisticated grift like Reddit was never going to work.

Cholesterol Myths

Posted on by

I saw this linked over at Maggie’s Farm.

Fats were singled out as the major enemy.

Research results published in the mid-1900s indicated that fats in our diets posed a health hazard.

Fats were not just full of calories that made us overweight. There were indications that fats were the main reason why a wave of cardiovascular diseases washed over the industrialised countries of the West starting in the early 20th century.

Research efforts and nutritional advice focused on how dangerous fats were and toward the end of the century a healthy diet consisted low-fat foods – a message heard at the doctor’s office and hyped by all the magazines.

Simultaneously, carbohydrates, including sugar, snuck below the radar, according to Birger Svihus, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).

Why were carbs viewed so long as positive for health?

Svihus thinks he has found the answer in research:

Scientists in the 1970s concluded that the human body could not convert carbohydrates into fat.

That meant you couldn’t become overweight or clog your bloodstream with fats by eating carbohydrates, whether they came from sweets or whole grain bread.

I’m often amazed by how much of the past has been forgotten. It is not just the ancient times or even the medieval times. We cannot remember what happened last week. There’s no great mystery as why the governments got the diet recommendations all wrong and it was not an honest error.

The first thing to know is the Framingham Study. From Wikipedia:

The Framingham Heart Study is a long-term, ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study began in 1948 with 5,209 adult subjects from Framingham, and is now on its third generation of participants.[1] Prior to it almost nothing was known about the “epidemiology of hypertensive or arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease”.[2] Much of the now-common knowledge concerning heart disease, such as the effects of diet, exercise, and common medications such as aspirin, is based on this longitudinal study. It is a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in collaboration with (since 1971) Boston University.[1] Various health professionals from the hospitals and universities of Greater Boston staff the project.

Initial finding from that study suggested a link between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Thus was born the low-fat craze that has been with us for decades. Industry quickly figured out how to capitalize on this and make enormous amounts of money.

The first way was to use a waste product from food production to make a substitute for butter. That’s right. Margarine is made from waste. Food companies quickly figured out that the stuff they were throwing away could be re-purposed into “low-fat” foods. The stunning success of margarine led to a flood of low-fat stuff that is still with us.

Of course you don’t sell product without advertising and advertising is mostly about convincing people that your product is better than the alternative. If you’re in the business of selling low-fat foods, what better way than to point to government science as the reason your stuff is better?

Of course, you need to make sure the science does not change so lavishing the government and its scientists with money to keep proving the same point is a good investment. It’s not an accident that Big Food is an enthusiastic supporter of Big Government.

That may strike you as excessively cynical, but here is a long article from The Atlantic Monthly that is my source. You’ll not the date is 1989. That’s right, I recalled from memory an article from a quarter century ago and found it on-line.

Little Green Men

Posted on by

Over the last week or so I have been going back and forth with a friend about the timeline in the Terminator movies. With the new one coming out, the old ones have been on cable. I either forgot or I was unaware that they had made a fourth movie, based around the John Connor character, so I watched it the other day. That film tries to address the timeline issue, which is what spawned the discussion.

The trouble with time travel, of course, is the paradox. In this case, sending Kyle Reese back in time could alter the timeline in such a way that the future no longer includes the possibility of sending that same guy back in time. That’s the paradox. It is the old bit about going back in time to kill your parents. It’s a logical impossibility.

Therefore, the only way the movies can make any sense is if the future guy is destined to be a part of the natural timeline. Your attempt to go back and kill your parents always fails, but in the attempt, events are shaped in such a way that you one day decide to go back in time to kill your parents. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In the movie four they try to tidy up this bit of the plot, so they make it clear that John Connor knows how this works. He knows he sends his father back in time to save his mother. The trouble with that is he could roll the dice and decide to just shoot the man destined to be his father, thus scrambling the whole thing, but then that would mean someone else was his father.

The point here is that time travel as a plot devise is fine as long as you don’t think about it too much. The only way to make it work logically is to either accept determinism or the multiverse. The former naturally appeals to humans, while the latter is incomprehensible to most people, so Hollywood preaches a weird form of fatalism in these movies.

There’s a similar problem with space aliens. Logic say that intelligent life evolving on another planet is most likely going to look a lot like us.

They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.

From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.

Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.

Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.

This is most certainly true, to a point. A planet the size of earth orbiting a sun similar to ours would probably be very similar to earth. In order to support carbon based life of any complexity it will need to look very much like earth. An intelligent species evolving on an earth like planet will therefore come out pretty close to humans. Maybe all the smart people are black instead of Chinese, but otherwise things would be pretty close.

“An area of biology which is becoming popular, perhaps too popular, that the possibility evolution is becoming much more predictable than people thought,” he told The Independent. “The book is really trying to persuade the world that evolutionary convergence is completely ubiquitous. Wherever you look you see it.

“The theme is to try and drive the reader, gently of course, into the possibility that the things which we regard as most important, ie cognitive sophistication, large brains, intelligence, tool making, are also convergent. Therefore, in principle, other Earth-like planets should very much end up with the same sort of arrangement.”

Professor Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John’s College, said it follows that plant and animal life on other planets able to support life would also look similar to Earth’s.

He said: “Certainly it’s not the case that every Earth-like planet will have life let alone humanoids. But if you want a sophisticated plant it will look awfully like a flower. If you want a fly there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to swim, like a shark, there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to invent warm-bloodedness, like birds and mammals, there’s only a few ways to do that.

The missing bit here is we don’t know what we will look like 10,000 years from now. We know, for example, that humans as a whole are about ten points dumber now than in the Victorian era. The main reason for that is stupidity is not as lethal as it was then. Similarly, we are physically weaker as a whole, due to the fact we do far less physical labor.

An intelligent life form on another planet that is able to traverse the stars to reach earth will be vastly more advanced than us and therefore further down the timeline of evolution. If the artificial intelligence people are right, they will have long ago figured out how to upload their consciousness into the machine and will no longer be organic, as we currently understand it.

Of course, a species with the ability to traverse the stars will surely have the ability to cloak their presence from us anyway. Therefore, the only way we will ever encounter space aliens is when we evolve to the point where we can traverse the stars and meet them halfway. Alternatively, we will see the humanoids of another planet when we visit, but they will look like retarded apes to us as we will have evolved well beyond our current meat stick form.

In other words, there are no little green men and even if there were, they would not reveal themselves to us anyway.

The Church of Climate Change

Posted on by

One of my themes is how belief warps how people process information. The old line about how the fanatic only sees that which confirms his fanaticism is obviously true. Fans of Manchester United will believe anything horrible about fans of Liverpool. At the same time, they will never believe anything bad about the boys on their team. Fans of Tom Brady think he is innocent, while fans of the New Jersey teams think he is in some way responsible for killing Kennedy.

In public affairs, it works the same. Republicans think Democrats are secretly plotting to make Karl Marx our new god and Democrats think Republicans want to bring back slavery. This week the MYTimes went after Marco Rubio and every conservative is rushing to his defense. A week ago many of them thought he was  bum due to his open borders fanaticism.

It also has another manifestation. If you are convinced some event is inevitable, then all signs point to that inevitability. Read Zero Hedge for a week or two and you see what I mean. They are convinced the apocalypse is upon us and every news event is spun into the sign that the end is near. Some variation of “the coming zombie apocalypse in three charts” is a daily staple.

I think that’s at the heart of the Global Warming cult. “Cult” is the right word at this point, since the people passionate about it have deranged themselves to the point where those outside suspect sinister things about the movement. I have liberal friends who send me thousand word e-mails filled with links and graphs claiming that any day now the tipping point will be reached and we’re doomed. They are so sure that Gaia is angry and ready to punish us, it is axiomatic.

What this means is the looming disaster is a certainty in the minds of the adherents, beyond dispute in the same way no sane person disputes gravity or the laws of motion. It is a fixed thing now and forever, like arithmetic. If the data  shows that maybe Gaia is not all that angry, it is assumed to be wrong. It has to be. So they go back and refine the data and massage it so that it is “corrected” to comport with what they know must be true.

NOAA faking their data is not deception in the way in which we normally think of it. They’re simply correcting what they believe must be a mistake. Imagine measuring a stone falling to earth and the results show it falls at rates well outside standard gravity. We know objects near earth accelerate toward the earth at 9.80665 m/s. That’s axiomatic. Any measure outside that must be due to human error.

That’s what’s happening with the constant fiddling with temperature data. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate is warming. The data coming in from various instruments must fit into the the accepted model or those instruments are defective. It has to be, otherwise the very foundation of reality is in doubt. More important, the very identity of the people in the field is in doubt.

The assumption is that data disproving the belief will somehow shake them out of their faith, but it does not work like that for most people. Look at the number of people who can walk into a natural history museum and still believe in young earth creationism. Glaciers could cover North America and the AGW people will say the planet is overheating. It’s why they have started saying climate change rather than global warming. It’s not a conscious effort to deceive; they are simply adapting to dis-confirmation.

Think of it this way. If you are a climate researcher today, you not only have the pressure to produce proof of global warming, you are surrounded by colleagues who believe deeply in the issue. Even if you know the data contradicts the prevailing “consensus” on the issue, it would take herculean will to publish it and face the wrath of your friends and colleagues. When you already are inclined to agree with them, the default assumption will be to dismiss the contradictory data and “correct” it.

There is an old idea called Social Comparison Theory that tries to explain why we tend to emulate those around us. The short version is that humans constantly compare themselves to others around them as a form of self-evaluation. If everyone else thinks pink flamingos on the lawn is gauche, then you are unlikely to install them on your lawn. This applies to opinions, styles, religion, etc.

It’s not hard to see how this is a great evolutionary adaptation. Cooperation scales very well. Two people working in tandem will beat two people working independently. Ten people working as a team will beat two people working in tandem. There are no examples of high status males, for example, whose lives prove the customs of their society nugatory. Rather, status is based on confirming that which society holds dear.

One of the things I find fascinating about third century Rome is how the Empire lost transcendent purpose. Everything was aimed at keeping the band together, so to speak. It’s argued that the Empire bankrupted itself trying to preserve the empire. In this period is when all sorts of odd cults and mystics popped up throughout the Empire. Sol Invictus and, of course, Christianity got going strong during this period as well.

In this post-Christian Era in the West, I think we’re seeing something similar. Oddball mass movements like climate change and its implicit millenarianism are only possible when no dominant ideology exists. The field is clear for people who no longer believe in anything to fall for everything. The Romans carried on a long time after they no longer had a reason to carry on, but eventually something replaced the old gods. Something will come along to be the dominant faith of the West, but I doubt it is climate change.