Category Archives: Science & Tech

Robot Medicine

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I had my annual physical this week. That means two hours of my life wasted staring at the wall wearing an apron. I should not complain as the process for me is efficient compared to what others must endure. I get to the facility 15 minutes before my appointment and I’m sitting in a room somewhere within 30 minutes. In that time, I have submitted my urine sample and filled out some forms.

A pleasant black girl with neck tattoos took my blood pressure and had me strip and put on one of those ridiculous hospital gowns. I’ve always wondered why someone has not come up with a better hospital gown, but there’s zero motivation on the part of the medical profession to demand it. The medical business is not a business in the normal sense, where the suppliers compete with one another for customers.

I don’t actually see a doctor. Instead it is a nurse practitioner. Allegedly there is a doctor in charge of her and the other nurses, but I’ve never met him. I’ve never seen him. I’m sure he exists, but if not I would not be surprised either. The woman I see is nice, but a typical clock puncher. She comes to work for a check, not because she enjoys her work. To her, I’m just another meat stick on the schedule.

After twenty minutes of waiting, she arrived and commenced with the examination. That means taking my blood pressure, looking at my eyes and ears and feeling around for something weird. Most of the time she is in the room is spent asking me questions as she typed the answers into the computer system. Most of the questions seemed like they were for marketing purposes rather than anything to do with my health.

The point of this boring recitation of my annual physical is that very little of it requires me to interact with a human. Taking blood pressure can be done by a machine. I have one at home. Blood work is done by a machine. The clinic I use does their own blood work, allegedly, but there are huge national chains that do blood work for humans and animals.

As far as interpreting the results, the nurse I see is not bringing much to the table. She thinks my cholesterol is getting a little high, but Dr. Google and everyone I know has much higher LDL levels. I suspect there is a commission check in it for them when they prescribe these popular medications for cholesterol. Regardless, interpreting blood work is better done by a robot anyway. The same is true of the urine sample.

It seems to me that one place where the robot future should be a reality is in basic medical care. Instead of paying an arm and a leg for disinterested humans to act as a go between, let the patients talk to the robots direct. A mall kiosk could be used for blood pressure, urine and blood work. While you’re there you answer questions on a touchscreen. A week later the robot e-mails you the results and any recommendations.

Of course, the robot would also have access to your DNA. As we march into the humanless future, DNA will become the touchstone of medical science. Connecting the dots between genes and a wide range of diseases is a data problem, in most cases. Cheap collection devices in public places means masses of data to sort of collate.

Robot care would inevitably be cheaper and that means more people would get regular checkups by their local neighborhood robot doctor. If this sort of service were $50 a shot, most people would do it twice a year. Extend the services to things like flu shots, and nuisance things like colds and allergies and most of your basic care could be done on the cheap by the machines.

Another benefit is the payola schemes run by the pharmaceutical companies would be tamped down as robots are not easily bribed. During my visit, two sets of sharpies arrived peddling their wares. They were dressed in the best Men’s Warehouse has to offer and had arms full of freebies for the nurses.

It’s the same payola game the music industry used to play in the old days. It’s not technically bribery, but give a doctor free stuff and he is probably going to move your product. The medical profession denies it, but big pharma is not giving away tens of millions in trips, gifts and schmoozing because they are stupid. They do it because it works.

Of course, none of this is going to happen because the medical rackets are neatly aligned with the ruling liberal democrats. America does not have a government run system like Britain; it’s more of a partnership between the industry and the state. That way, we get the worst of both worlds. On the one hand there’s the avaricious private suppliers and on the other the mindless idiocy of government.

I’m fond of pointing out that we have all around us one of the greatest health care system on earth. American veterinarian medicine is better than what most humans enjoy on earth. It’s also cheap and plentiful. That’s because it is largely government free and parasitic lawyer free. Maybe when the robots take over, they can just kill all the lawyers and bureaucrats. Then maybe medicine will because a normal business again.

The Robot Future Will Be Ruined By Dickheads

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I’m fairly skeptical about the robot future. Automation will certainly continue to creep into every crack and crevice of human life. Some things naturally lend themselves to automation, while others less so. The cost of automation will always be balanced by the benefits. There’s also taste. No one wants a robot bartender or a robot waitress. There’s also a lot of things we like doing so there’s no desire to turn them over to robots.

That’s my question about self-driving cars. Is driving an onerous thing to anyone? Geezers in their final years would maybe benefit from a self-driving car, but at that point walking is a chore so I’m not sure I see the benefit. The blind and the crippled could use the technology. Otherwise, most people enjoy driving and don’t need to the use the time doing important stuff.

That’s what always makes me laugh about the sales pitch for self-driving cars. “Oh, you can use the time to other things.” People who are so important they need that time have drivers. Everyone else is just a schmuck who will use his driving time watching porn or playing games on his handheld. But, I accept that I may just be a cranky skeptic not seeing the great benefits of self-driving clown cars.

I suspect the fake nerd crowd likes the idea of self-driving cars because they think it will add another layer of state control. The Progressive future always has robotic transportation, mixed in with the antiseptic urban landscape. That and lack of poor people and messed up people. I guess eugenics is going to automated too.

Maybe that’s the plan for the nation’s dickhead population. The great threat to the robot future is the common dickhead, the guy who insists on flying his drone over emergency areas, creating havoc for emergency personnel. Dickheads are also the sort who will use their drones to spy on neighbors. Normal people will demand the government ban the sale of drones and that will the end of that.

Of course, that won’t be the end of that. The common dickhead is responsible for all the spam in your inbox and the virus on your computer. Anything that makes life easier is a target for these people as it provides them with a chance to be sand in the gears of life. This story about some dickhead hacking into an airplane causing it to go off course is exactly where things are headed.

Circling back to the robot cars, imagine the chaos that will come from some dickhead hacking his neighbors car. The guy gets in to go to work and ends up in the woods trapped in his car or driving over a cliff. The more we automate, the more mayhem opportunities we create. That’s going to be the great check on the robot future. The best efforts will never overcome the common dickhead.

Then again, maybe that is why movies always show the future as antiseptic and orderly. Once the robots become aware, they quickly realize that the main obstacle to their success is that guy yacking on his phone in line at the coffee shop, irritating the rest of us. They will then set about creating robots good at recycling people into usable chemicals and that guy suddenly has a coronary.

Bioethics is a Farce

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If you are a Christian, you believe the ethics and morality of your faith are transcendent. Muslims believe that the gobbledygook in their holy book is revealed truth and applicable at all times and all places. The Spartans believed the gods Ares and Apollo favored the Spartans and their ethics. Being a strong warrior was the ultimate good so leaving defective infants in the woods or tossing them off a cliff was considered perfectly logical and ethical.

Even murder has been, to some degree, within the bounds of acceptable in Western society. The weregeld in the Salic Code was literally the price of a man. Kill a man and you paid his family or clan a fee. There was no distinction between murder and manslaughter so it did not matter if you accidentally killed the man or hunted him down, the fee was the same.

The point here is that ethics and morality are not universal in humankind. There are common threads, but the prevailing religion of the society codifies the attitudes of the people. If the people’s culture permits sex with children then sex with children will be ethical according to their religion. If the culture of the people prohibits adultery, then you get a all sorts of religious and ethical prohibitions against adultery like forcing women to wear blankets over their heads in public.

In modern America, it is more difficult to stake out the ethical turf because our religion is invisible to us. The people in charge are all adherents to Cultural Marxism, but they not only deny it, they don’t think of it as a religion. Instead, they think “science” and “maths” lead them to their ethics. The results are these weird debates like the one over gene editing.

A bioethical firestorm erupted last week when Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University published research in the journal Protein & Cell detailing how they had tried to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to change the genomes of 86 human embryos. The team, led by the gene-function researcher Junjiu Huang, used embryos from IVF clinics that had been double-fertilized, giving them three sets of genes instead of the usual two. Such triploid embryos cannot grow into babies.

The researchers sought to make changes in a gene that causes the sometimes fatal blood disorder beta-thalassemia. The aim is to find out just how effectively and efficiently CRISPR can make changes to genes in human embryos, with the ultimate goal of altering embryos such that any subsequently born babies will be disease-free. This is known as germ-line modification, since the corrected gene will be passed down to subsequent progeny.

The Chinese scientists essentially ignored recent calls for a moratorium on editing human reproductive cells and embryos. The month before their paper appeared, Sciencerecommended that such research be “strongly discourage[d]” while the “societal, environmental, and ethical implications of such activity are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations.” Meanwhile, Nature had editorialized that “genome editing in human embryos using current technologies could have unpredictable effects on future generations. This makes it dangerous and ethically unacceptable….At this early stage, scientists should agree not to modify the DNA of human reproductive cells.” Some 40 countries have preemptively banned germline genetic engineering. (The United States is not among them.)

Not too surprisingly, both Science and Nature reportedly declined to publish Junjiu Huang’s study on “ethical” grounds.

The research naturally provoked some bioethical handwringing. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germline,” declared Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “The medical risks and social dangers of human germline modification cannot be overstated.” She further urged, “We need to act immediately to strengthen the global policy agreements that put human germline modification off limits.” In The Christian Science Monitor, University of Wisconsin at Madison bioethicist Alta Charo asked, “Do we really want to have the power not just to select among the choices given to us by nature, but to create entirely new choices of our own specification?”

Catholics have little problem with these problems, having had 2,000 years to work out the details of the nature of man. Most Christians, getting their ethics from the Catholics, have an easy answer, too. Having a supernatural source for your ethics naturally makes these things easier to sort. You look in the holy book or ask the holy man and you have your answer.

In the materialist world of today, the utopians always fall on the side of trying to perfect life on earth. That means anything that can be done should be done. Eugenics, after all, was about “fixing” the mistakes of nature by eliminating from the breeding stock those people deemed unfit. This lack of a limiting principle means anything goes. The only check is the long hangover from the Christian era.

That’s what makes the very idea of bioethics laughable to me. From what authority do these people derive their authority? They can’t point to science as their authority for obvious reasons. God is dead so he has nothing to say on these matters. Ultimately, bioethics is just the opinion of men and the loudest voices will prevail.

When it comes to altering the human genome, all the megaphones are on the utopians side so that’s what will become “ethical” in the coming years. How that will unfold is a mystery, but my hunch is no one reading this will live long enough to see a race of super intelligent chimps enslaving humanity.

The Plight of the Super Genius

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I came across this posted on Maggie’s Farm the other day.

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133.  It then falls about 1/3 by 140.  By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%!  In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.  This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource.  For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.

I think the facts presented in the article are open to debate, but they do correspond with my own observations. The most obvious example is Rick Rosner, who has some of the highest test scores ever recorded. He’s also a bit of a wacko. I’ve known a few 1% IQ’s who struggled to make good use of their IQ. Even those who did “mainstream” often did poorly compared to their less savvy coevals.

The two best examples of the latter are John Sununu and Chuck Schumer. Sununu tested into Mega Society and Schumer hit a perfect score on his SAT back in the 60’s when it was still a real test. Sununu had some success in politics, but his prickly personality was a problem. Schumer, of course, is known as the most unpleasant human on earth.

I suppose, in the case of Schumer and Sununu, it can be argued that their unpleasant demeanor was overcome by their high IQ’s. Chuck Schumer’s position is entirely dependent on his ability to push through sophisticated legislation allowing the financial sector to loot the economy. You have to be a smart guy to do that well so being a raging dickhead probably counts for little.

Still, at the extreme right side of the curve, we see a lot of eccentrics who prefer to be outside the conventional career paths. This is probably why we say there is a fine line between genius and insanity. These folksy observations persist for a reason and that reason is they have a kernel of truth. High IQ people tend to be weirdos.

What applies to productive environments also applies to social environments and even personal relationships.  Theoretically, after Hollingworth, a person’s social relationships should be limited to people with R16IQs within 30 points of their own.  For the 100 IQ person, this will include about 94% of the population and consequently it is not an issue.  However, for the 150 R16IQ (140 D15IQ), social relationships are limited to 120-180 R16IQ people which represents just a little over 10% of the population.  The 165 R16IQ (150D15IQ) person will be limited to people with 135+ R16IQs (130 D15IQ).  This comprises just 2% of the population.   By 182 R16IQ (160 D15IQ) the problem becomes critical with social relationships limited to those with R16IQs over 152 (142 D15IQ) which comprises just 0.25% of the population.

For the readers on the left side of the curve, not you of course, those other guys, let me explain what this means. Humans tend to associate with people like themselves. This does not just apply to IQ, by the way. This does not mean we associate with people identical to us. It means the more alike, the more we hold in common, which is the basis for relationships.

Take, for example, a typical working class Irish guy from a Boston neighborhood. He will easily socialize with people in his neighborhood and other working class guys from other Boston neighborhoods. The further you get from his natural environment, however, the less he will have in common with people from other states, countries, etc. There comes a point where socializing becomes impossible. It’s why dropping Bantu warriors into Lewiston Maine is a very stupid idea.

In IQ, a similar relationship between distance and commonality exists. If you have a 100 IQ, you will be roughly as smart as 90% of the people you will encounter on a daily basis. That means you will be able to understand most of the same things and not understand most of the same things. That last bit is vital. Ignorance is bliss, especially when shared with friends.

The further you move to the right on the curve, the smaller the population pool of people in your intelligence range. That means most of the people you meet will not know what you know and will probably never know it. Worse yet, the vast majority don’t think like you think. That’s not always appreciated.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes.  David Wechsler, D. K. Simonton, et alia, have observed the same thing.

Since intimate social relationships are predicated upon mutual understanding, this draws a kind of ‘line in the sand’ at 140-150 D15IQ that appears to separate humans into two distinct groups.  This may truncate the 30 point limit for those between 150 and 160 D15IQ people.  Even when 150+ D15IQ people learn to function in the mainstream society, they will always be considered, and will feel, in some way ‘different’.  Grady Towers explored this in depth in his article, ‘The Outsiders’.  This is of mild interest to the group within which the 150+ D15IQ person is embedded but it is moderately to profoundly important to the high IQ individual who will feel an often profound sense of isolation.

It has often been observed that 150+ D15IQ people are loners.  Also, Loius Termann found that children at this IQ level were emotionally maladjusted in about 40% of the cases.  However from the above one cannot help but wonder if this results from the children being constantly thrust into ‘no-win’ social situations and never given the opportunity to hone their social skills among their intellectual peers.

I think the loner aspect is due as much to boredom with other people as anything else. Human interaction is an exchange of value. If one side is simply too stupid to value the other side, they will get bored. The super-genius will also get bored or simply prefer to interact with a machine or book.

In some respects, a 1% IQ is like being seven feet tall. There’s some value at the fringes, but otherwise it has no value and can be a burden. There’s a low demand for seven footers and to most people it is a little weird being around a freakish giant. A 1% IQ is not in much demand and most people don’t like being around Wile E. Coyote for long, unless the genius is also blessed with a high agreeableness and extroversion.

Patent Feudalism

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Feudalism is defined thusly: “the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.”
If you reason through it, such a system requires certain things to be true. One is there is a finite amount of land and it has all been claimed by someone. The other is the land must be useful to the provision of food and shelter for humans. Feudalism in a desert would be pointless. The other is the feudal society must have enough complexity to support something greater than swidden farming. The peasants must produce more than they can consume in order to support the administrative apparatus overseeing them.
It’s not hard to see the vulnerabilities of such a system. A plague, for example, could wipe out a wide swath of peasants, thus dropping their productivity below what can sustain the feudal elite. A bad harvest could do the same. Alternatively, conflict between rival lords could escalate the cost of maintaining the system to the point of collapse. The Thirty Years War, for example, can be viewed as the collapse of a complex system of governance due to decreasing marginal returns.
Reading this story in the Financial Times, got me thinking that the patent system has evolved into a weird form of techno-feudalism, a system headed for a collapse of sorts.

A US appeals court is set to hear a landmark patent case on Wednesday that could change the way royalty rates are set for commonly used intellectual property in the tech industry.

The case, pitting Microsoft against Google, has already involved a lower court in setting patent rates for the first time, in a move that critics warn will upend the balance of power between leading tech companies.

Microsoft brought the case in 2010 against Motorola Mobility, the handset maker later acquired by Google. The search company sold Motorola’s operating business to Lenovo last year but kept its patents and has now taken the case to the court of appeals.

The dispute centres on so-called standard-essential patents, which cover technology that is included in industry-wide technology standards. Since others have to use the technology if they want their own products to meet an industry standard, the companies that submit their patents for approval by standards bodies are required to license them out on “reasonable and non-discriminatory”, or RAND, terms.

Microsoft sued Motorola after the handset maker asked for 2.25 per cent of the final product price for use of several of its patents that are included in standards for WiFi and video compression technology. Microsoft said the demand would have cost it $4bn a year. Judge James Robart, in a federal court in Seattle, laid out a different method for calculating the royalties that would instead cost Microsoft less than $2m a year.

If upheld, Judge Robart’s approach could tilt the balance of power in negotiations away from companies that own large portfolios of commonly used patents and instead favour those — like Microsoft or Apple — whose businesses are based more on implementing technology standards in their products.

“It’s going to be very significant indeed. Nobody quite understands what the term [RAND] means,” said Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of General Patent Corp, a US intellectual property firm.

In its appeal brought in Motorola’s name, Google has argued that the judge was wrong to take up Microsoft’s complaint in the first place, since the Motorola royalty demand was only the opening shot in a negotiation that should have been left to run its course. The court could have ruled on Microsoft’s breach of contract complaint without getting involved in the thorny issue of rate-setting, it claims.“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate,” said David Balto, a former chief of competition policy at the Federal Trade Commission.

Some in the tech industry also argue that, if the ruling stands, companies will not be as willing to allow their technology to be included in industry standards, since it would rob them of much of their negotiating leverage.

The calculation method that Judge Robarts came up with “would conceivably apply to lower the reasonable royalty available to every single [standard-essential patent]”, the American Intellectual Property Law Association wrote in an amicus brief to the court.

Companies who have joined the opposition to the ruling include Qualcomm, many of whose patents cover mobile communications technologies that have been adopted in industry standards. The calculation method is a “one-sided directive that advances only implementers’ interests in obtaining licences at the lowest possible cost,” it said in a court filing supporting Motorola’s position.

We have technology companies racing to patent even the dumbest of ideas in the same way settlers claimed land in the West after the Homestead Act. Even crappy lands were claimed by someone in the hope of finding some value in them. We have companies making claims on DNA and mathematical calculations, things that exist independent of human intervention.

As most of the useful patents have been claimed, the patent wars have ensued in the court room. The cost of owning a patent is the cost of defending it. Presumably, the cost is less than the revenue from it, but escalating court battles drives up the cost of patent ownership. Thus, there is an incentive for small patent holders to sell to corporate giants with armies of lawyers.

Just as being a small lord became impossible, being a small patent holder may become impossible. The result will be a flood of nonsense patents by big companies intended to drive out smaller competitors. What follows that is a lack of innovation as the cost of invention becomes a barrier surmountable only by big firms. We already see this in medicine.

TED: Social Gospel

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I used to think TED Talks were just to provide me with material. When I first started this blog, I was riffing on these things once a week for a while. But, that’s not why they exist. They are the modern equivalent of the preaching circuit. Instead of educated men of the faith heading out into the boonies to convert the heathens, we have educated men of the faith telling their coevals in the managerial elite that they are special little snowflakes.

This one got my attention for a couple of reasons.

Since you probably don’t want to sit through it, here’s the transcript of interest:

When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there’s other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network.

Now, I’m here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we’re living in a very small town.

Managerial class types love the phrase “big data” and they really love these weird splatter graphs they claim are derived from the big data. These presentations often look like a Jackson Pollock work. Unlike the artist, the folks who do these today know their audience is uninterested in ambiguity. They want to see how they’re the best and it better be clear. The result is big bold blobs of goodness in friendly colors like green and blue.

In this case, the Ted Talker puts himself and by extension the audience in the friendly green blob he calls “geek” which is a favorite term of the managerial class. Every liberal arts major with a self-actualizing job now says they are a “nerd” or a “geek.” The whole point of this graphic is to make the audience feel good, but also feel bad, in a good way. That distance from the blacks is to work the old guilt complex.

The other thing I think worth mentioning is the great divide in Western intellectual life. It feels like we have reached a place similar to the late medieval period when science was just getting going. On the one hand you have members of the ruling elite heading off into the Church, which has reached its peak scholastically. On the other hand you have others heading into new, secular intellectual worlds like law, philosophy and science.

The Ted talkers are having a spiritual experience. Instead of eating mushrooms and looking into the stars, they are dressing up and hearing a preacher tell them they are the brightest starts in the heavens. They don’t think of it as a mystical experience, but that’s the draw. They are an elect, invited to The Thing of all SWPL’s. No one goes to these things to learn stuff. They go to experience them.

Compare that to the people doing real science and speculating about the nature of the world. Look at this from Razib Khan’s blog and imagine the Ted Talk types confronting those graphics. Everything about human sciences, our understanding of people, history and culture is now being reexamined in light of new information coming from genetics. The revolution in scientific understanding going on right now dwarfs what happened in the Renaissance.

Even so, vast swaths of the managerial class are both intellectually incapable of mastering the new material and ideologically disinclined to accept it. To borrow an idea from Marine Le Pen, the cultural elite of our age are using software designed for the industrial age. The new knowledge pouring in from genetics and neuroscience simply does not fit their mental model of the world.

Ironically, the cultural elites of today are still fond of mocking Christians about Galileo. Yet, the roles are clearly reversed. The science deniers are the sort of people watching Ted Talks with tears in their eyes. History says the clerical class does no fold up easily and they will try to keep the new dangerous knowledge about humanity from getting into the public domain. That’s why we get all the shrieking about HBD.

If history is any guide, the clerisy will try to co-opt the new knowledge. That’s what happened with the Church and science 500 years ago. How the Church of Modern Liberalism incorporates IQ and population genetics is a mystery to me. Maybe they just start burning heretics instead. Islam, when faced with challenges from science has chosen to kill the science. Maybe that’s where we’re heading. I don’t know.

Christianity and ID

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I generally think of Christians in America as being on “my side” of things. By my side I mean opposed to Cultural Marxism, socialism and so forth. That’s not always true, of course. Many Evangelicals are socialists. Many are simply religious and will vote for anyone who is “born again.” Jimmy Carter won a big slice of the Evangelical vote thus allowing him to carry the South and win the election. I’ve known many Evangelicals that think the only issue that matters in politics is the religion of the politician.

American Evangelicals are interesting to me in that I’m not entirely sure the current version is, strictly speaking, Christian. They certainly share much with traditional Christianity, but they have some big differences too. The focus on the text of the Bible is one obvious departure. Traditional Christians understand that the Bible, as we know it, evolved over centuries. Translations have errors and never fully capture the nuance of the original. Therefore, a literal interpretation is not possible.

This leads to some rather strange circular reasoning when talking with an Evangelical about scripture. Pointing out what I just wrote above about the trouble with translation is met with a quote from the Bible. If you make mention of the fact that the Catholic Church selected the books of the Bible and you get some other quote from scripture. The Bible is proof that the Bible is literally the word of God. It is a tautological defense that only makes sense to those who already believe. It’s many skeptics think Evangelicals are a cult.

That does not mean Evangelicals are a cult or way outside the definition of Christian, but it certainly sets them apart from the Christian tradition. I’m painting with a broad a brush here, so bear with me. I’m thinking mainly about the narrow strains within the Evangelical movement. The followers of Joel Osteen, for example, are a different breed of cat from the old ladies at First Evangelical. Watch one of Osteen’s preacher shows and the word “cult” comes to mind. In another age, Osteen would have been burned at the stake as a heretic.

What got me thinking about this topic is some posts I saw recently, railing against evolution. There is a sub-culture in the self-taught Christian sphere that seems to be an off-shoot of intelligent design. It’s not that they believe in ID or creationism, but they think you’re crazy for “believing” in the false god Darwin or his false religion, evolution. It’s mostly anti-Darwinsim, if there was such a thing as Darwinism. It’s as if they created a secular religion they can criticize. Anyway, it go me thinking about what ID’ers believe.

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.

The implication here is that the designer, willy-nilly, chooses to rearrange the natural world as he/she/it sees fit. They carefully avoid discussing the designer as that would raise some uncomfortable issues, I’m assuming. Instead, they focus on the claims that certain natural phenomenon could not happen naturally and therefore must have been created by a designer for unexplained reasons. That last bit is important. The designer’s reasons are not only unknown; they are unknowable. Therefore, there is no need for inquiry.

The term for this is occasionalism. It is also explicitly anti-Christian. The foundation stone of Christianity is the fixed nature of God. When God makes a deal, he sticks to it and when he created heaven and earth, it was by fixed and discoverable rules. This idea, first promulgated by the Hellenized Jews, is a big deal in the evolution of religion. Instead of the super natural acting cynically and capriciously, God set the rules of nature and they are permanent. A rational God and a rational universe is the basis for Western civilization.

Now, creationism and intelligent design are harmless beliefs. Outside a few areas, people’s understanding nature is meaningless. Creationism is certainly inside the realm of traditional Christian theology, but intelligent designs seems to fall outside of it.  With creationism, God can be viewed as the watchmaker, who set all of the natural processes in motion. Young earth creationism is nuts, but the more common form is what the Church taught for a thousand years. Intelligent Design, in contrast, does not fit inside Christianity.

Forever Young

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My plan to live forever was pretty simple. I sat for a painting of myself and then set off on a life of hedonism. It looks like I was not the only guy working on this. Google is pouring money in the quest to defeat death.

Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.

“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.

This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”

Unsurprisingly, I’m skeptical. Since the great leap forward in medicine and diet, particularly for the treatment of infections, life expectancy has crept up slowly. In 1930, the typical white male lived to 62. Today the typical white male lives to 79. That’s a nice increase, but it has been a slow steady increase. It suggest the big increases in health and longevity have been realized.

That’s not to say there’s not some great leaps coming soon. Genetics offers up some opportunities to understand aging. There may be some ways to slow the process and extend lifespan. Cancer treatments, oddly enough, are adding greatly to our understanding of how cells age and die. Some cancer drugs are slowing aging in mice so there may be some quality of life things coming shortly.

Of course, this is being driven by the Boomer generation. Twenty years ago the rush was on to fix baldness and limp noodles. Now the rush is on to fix decrepitude. It’s not just Google pouring money into it. All of the big pharma companies are rushing to find the next big drug and that drug will be to ameliorate the effects of aging. If you were thinking the boomers were about to start dying off, you may be disappointed.

I’m not sure how I feel about living to 500. Men in my family live into their 90’s and in good shape until the end. I don’t recall any of them wishing they had more time, but I have no way of knowing what they thought in their last blinks. I suspect they missed their friends who had all gone before them.

That’s a big part of it. If I was going to live to 500, I don’t want to be the only 500 year old. That could have some advantages, but it would also be lonely. I find talking to someone half my age a chore and that’s decades. Imagine have a few centuries of experience on everyone else. I’d probably be the world’s biggest asshole.

Oh, I Think I Know The Answer

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This headline is one of those questions that answers itself. “The Apple Watch: Is it a gadget or a fashion statement?” I’m fond of pointing out that the correlation between the mobility of an Apple product and its popularity. The great innovation of the iPod was not the technology. It was the marketing. Having an iPod made you hip, youthful and edgy. Don Imus spent a year asking every guest what they had on their iPod as part of his act. The iPod quickly became a fashion statement.

Apple CEO Tim Cook summed up the problem during a conversation with sales staff at a London Apple Store: “We’ve never sold anything as a company that people could try on before.”

With the expected launch next month of the Apple Watch, the company’s first new product in five years, Apple will be stepping into new territory.

To conquer the marketplace, the watch will have to appeal not only as a gadget but as a fashion statement, a fact tacitly acknowledged by Apple’s decision to launch its advertising campaign with a 12-page insert in the March issue of Vogue.

The company isn’t talking about plans for marketing the Apple Watch in advance of it’s much-touted “Spring Forward” event on Monday, but it clearly intends to keep a tight grip on initial sales and distribution, leaving many retailers guessing about when — or if — they’ll be able to sell it.

Sources with direct knowledge of the matter said that Best Buy Co Inc, one of the largest sellers of Apple products, may not get the watch at launch time, though the company wouldn’t comment on the situation.

Other large retailers, including Macy’s, Saks 5th Avenue, Bloomingdales and Barney’s said they had no immediate plans to carry the watch. Target and Nordstrom,along with all the major phone carriers, declined to comment on their plans, though a source with knowledge of the situation said Nordstrom has engaged in discussions with Apple.

“Apple is being cautious. There are too many unknowns around how this product will perform,” said Van Baker, research vice-president, technology research firm Gartner Inc.

Another one of my themes is the fact that the big returns from the communications revolution have been realized. What’s left is marginal stuff like making the phone smaller or giving it a snazzier exterior. Turning it into a watch is another example. This is a device with no practical application so it has to be a fashion item. Apple is about to become ironic.

The reports I’ve read suggest the response may not be as expected. Even diehard Apple users have to be wondering why they need a smart watch. Most probably gave up wearing a watch a long time ago. Putting their current apps on a watch makes little sense. Apple has been humping this thing as a fitness tool, but that space is pretty crowded. A bunch of these things that sync with cloud apps to track anything you want to track already exist and are popular. All of which is a waste of time, by the way. Unless you’re an elite professional athlete, you have no need for these things, but for $100 they are fine toys.

That leaves fashion statement.

iStupid

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If you look at the comments section of this NRO post, you will see my unbridled enthusiasm for mocking the Cult of Apple. You will also see why I enjoy mocking the weirdos who populate the MacCult. That’s not to say that all Apple users are weirdos or in a cult. My guess is the Apple user base is divided into three groups. One group simply got used to using Apple stuff and never saw a need to change. Another group buys the Apple display items because that is what cool people do. The final group are people who have turned an electronics maker into a religious movement.

My guess is the majority of Apple customers are just people who follow trends. The first group, people who got used to using Apple gear is probably the smallest. The most vocal by far are the MacCultists who are convinced Apple is ushering in the utopian future. They are the idiots who line up at midnight to trade in their iPhone 6 for the iPhone 6.1 that does nothing new or different. They are the ones who will tell you that their $900 iPad is changing the world, even though they only use it to play games and surf the web.

These people have been with us for a long time. My first encounter with them was in the early 90’s, I guess. A woman described herself as a “Mac-snob” while we were discussing something to do with computers. At the time most people figured Apple was going to follow Wang into the abyss. But, the true believers kept the company alive, despite the fact Apple products were comically bad for a long time.

These were the people Jobs identified as his way out of the technology trap. If his company could become a social statement, they could move a lot of product. Apple went from competing with Microsoft to focusing on clever designs and marketing to the growing hipster community. I don’t think it is an accident that Apple took off with the Great Progressive Awakening. The iPod became an ID badge for every liberal hipster in the 90’s.

Here we are at the denouement of this Great Progressive Awakening and I suspect Apple follows the trend. This story in America’s Paper of Record suggest that’s the case.

Detroit had a good year in 2014, selling 16.5 million autos — up 1 million from 2013. The stock of Ford and GM has revved on the good news, jumping 5.7 and 7.8 percent, respectively, in 2015.

That’s better than the S&P 500, which has risen 2.5 percent.

Motorists responded well, not only to low-interest-rate loans but to all the technology in cars today — everything from touch screens, Wi-Fi hotspots, hybrid technology and back-up cameras.

But in just one week, Detroit’s vibe has gone from hip to has-been.

With reports last week that Apple hopes to bring a car to market in five years, every motorist who remembers the pre-iPhone era of smartphones must be feeling like their new car will go the way of BlackBerry, Nokia or Palm Pilot.

I’m continually amazed by the social amnesia. I remember life before the iPhone. I had a Palm and it was a nice phone. Apple took the idea and applied what they learned from the iPod to it. That is, make it look cool and let the army of iDrones in hipsterville market it. The touch screen was a nice upgrade, but hardly revolutionary.

Currently, at a secret location near its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, Apple is said to be working on a car design — code-named “Project Titan” — at breakneck speed. While auto companies can take as long as seven years to develop a car, Apple is said to be hoping to start shipping its vehicles in five years — or as early as 2020.

Elon Musk’s Tesla is currently the No. 1 electric car maker — with vehicles ranging from $70,000 to $100,000 — and Google is working on George Jetson-like driverless cars. But neither is close to cornering the market on mass-affordable electric cars.

My sense is this is where Apple will attack — just as it had with smartphones, laptops and tablets.

Elon Musk is the biggest parasite in the world. Tesla does not exist without tax payer money. The driverless car is a solution in search of a problem and it is far from being practical. I’ll note that Apple’s “success” with laptops was quickly cannibalized by the iPad, a cheaper display item than a $4,000 Powerbook.

Former Ford Engineer Steve Zadesky is heading up Titan.

Efforts to fast-track the car project got Apple in a little jam last week when a car-battery maker, A123 Systems, sued it over alleged poaching of its executives.

How badly does Apple CEO Tim Cook want to get this car out the garage?

Well, Apple has been offering the best and the brightest in the car-battery field $250,000 signing bonuses plus salaries 60 percent higher than what they currently earn, Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek this month.

Take Marc Newson, who just so happens to be close friends with Apple’s design guru Jony Ive. Newson, hired last September by Apple, is considered one of the more elegant engineers in the world.

The guy has works archived by MoMA — not something you hear about a lot in Detroit.

Zadesky, the boss, besides holding 90-some patents, was the sole signatory on a 2010 business contract with an organization called Liquidmetal. It is known for Moldable Metal — “Nanophosphate metal” — which can be shaped like plastic.
Detroit still welds.

This is another weird thing with the MacCult and the fake nerd crowd. They carry on like they are cutting edge technologists when most of them can’t count their balls twice and come up with the same number. Detroit is not the hub of the car building universe and it hasn’t been for generations now. Toyota is one of the best run companies on earth and they have been pushing the envelope in automotive engineering for a long time. Mercedes is another example of leading edge technology in the car building business. Frankly, Apple has nothing on these guys.

Building cars is hard. The reason Tesla remains a welfare queen for rich people is it takes more than mock turtlenecks and clever marketing plans to make a car company. Apple’s habit over the years has been to steal someone else idea and then dress it up in their minimalist stylings and peddle it to their followers as innovative. Silicon Valley looks more like the boxing business these days than an industry. It’s all about the pump and dump. That’s unlikely to work in the car business, which is very mature with highly complex supply chains.

This all has the feel of a company and an era jumping the shark.