pav.alxndr

I’m a small guy, at 5'5" I think some people almost find it alarming how tiny I am, at least compared to how tall they expect me (or any adult male) to be. It’s me in the context of other people, the relative scale can be surprising.

On my Galaxy Note 5, it has a one-handed small-screen mode, where the contents of the display shrink for ease of use with one hand. Turns out that this unthinkably-tiny display-within-a-display is almost exactly the same size as the iPhones I stopped using as recently as late 2013. To see that size of a display now, or to hold an iPhone 5 or earlier, is to hold something that suddenly seems impossibly, laughably small. It’s the context of having gotten used to 5.5, 5.7, and 6-inch displays that makes them seem so small, when they once seemed so, well, optimal.

Know what? Everything is small. Enjoy the zen-like experience of this Business Insider video (which I seem to be having some trouble embedding, so if it doesn’t show below, click the previous link), which shows the relative size of the micro- and macro-cosmos. It induces for me a kind of sublime separation from everything, and at the same time a kind of vertigo. But a pleasant one.

A more, let’s say, manual version of this kind of revelations-of-cosmic-scale can be found here. And of course you can also dizzy yourself with the immeasurable heavens.

[This post has been updated with some really brilliant insight from the author.] Mars One, the pseudo-pyramid scheme that pretends to be sending astronauts to Mars in the next decade, has inspired a fashion show.

Björn Borg, who I assume is very important in the fashion world, showed off a collection of what is said to be sportswear the serves as “a tribute to the courage and the faith that these people show by going out to the unknown for the evolution of mankind.”

That’s all fine. The idea of human beings risking everything for the longshot chance to live out their days on another planet is, in fact, deeply inspiring. The problem, readers of this blog will already know, is that Mars One is, at best, just shy of a scam. Far too many of its core claims have been shown to be either outright false or gross exaggerations, its stated aims have been declared utterly implausible by even the most optimistic experts, and former would-be candidates for the big trip have revealed the shoddy and ethically dubious process for choosing candidates.

But the idea in abstract? Totally compelling. That, with a heaping dose of laziness, must be why outlets like Space.com and others still repeat the press releases of the Mars One company, complete with references to the alleged 200,000 applicants, which is complete bullshit.

And how perfect a metaphor is this kind of high-end fashion show for the Mars One concept? The Borg collection of clothing is lofty and future-looking, but also entirely impractical and more than a little absurd. The clothes are aspirational, but of course will never be worn by anyone.

It is Mars One.

Forget the boondoggle. How does the Björn Borg “Training for Mars” sportswear look?

I know nothing about the fashion world, so I’ll leave you to be the judge of that. The show was held about a week ago in Stockholm, with Mars One candidates in attendance. Here’s the official promo video from after the fact:

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

This is clearly not the kind of merchandising Mars One needs to fund their adventure. They need to find some product to be “the official nacho cheese sauce of Mars One” or something.

As a side note, Engadget is going to begin a video series profiling five of the Mars One candidates, and I hope they are going to approach the project with an appropriately skeptical eye. I will be watching with interest. The trailer alone with the wide-eyed, hopeful candidates, and with the parents pained at the idea of their kids disappearing into space, thinking it could actually happen, only makes me more irritated at the scheme.

Here are my previous posts on Mars One:

• Mars One: Interplanetary Travel on Underpants Gnome Principles
• Mars One is Amway-Meets-Heaven’s Gate
• Here Come the Apologetics from “Some” Mars One Candidates
• Mavericky Mars One

I'm reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, about the possible capabilities and potential threats posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. It's a little dry at times, to be honest, but then he'll go and say something (in the nonfiction-science-book equivalent of a deadpan) that makes your mind explode. Because you're probably thinking, hey, a superintelligent A.I. could maybe take things over on this planet, and that'd be just crazy! Well sure, but also...

Consider a superintelligent agent with actuators connected to a nanotech assembler. Such an agent is already powerful enough to overcome any natural obstacles to its indefinite survival. Faced with no intelligent opposition, such an agent could plot a safe course of development that would lead to its acquiring the complete inventory of technologies that would be useful to the attainment of its goals. For example, it could develop the technology to build and launch von Neumann probes, machines capable of interstellar travel that can use resources such as asteroids, planets, and stars to make copies of themselves. By launching one von Neumann probe, the agent could thus initiate an open-ended process of space colonization. The replicating probe’s descendants, traveling at some significant fraction of the speed of light, would end up colonizing a substantial portion of the Hubble volume, the part of the expanding universe that is theoretically accessible from where we are now. All this matter and free energy could then be organized into whatever value structures maximize the originating agent’s utility function integrated over cosmic time—a duration encompassing at least trillions of years before the aging universe becomes inhospitable to information processing.

Suck it, Entire Known Universe. You're about to get iColonized.

Your conscious mind may not be doing anything all that interesting. No, not just you, but like, for everyone. From San Francisco State University:

Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella’s “Passive Frame Theory” suggests that the conscious mind is like an interpreter helping speakers of different languages communicate.

“The interpreter presents the information but is not the one making any arguments or acting upon the knowledge that is shared,” Morsella said. “Similarly, the information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious processes, nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man, and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.”

I have to say, though this kind of freaked me out when I first read it, having a kind of knee-jerk revulsion to the idea of a more or less hapless consciousness, upon consideration this seems entirely reasonable. One really has to let go of the idea of a kind of mini-self in one’s head that does all the pondering and decision-making, and think more about the mind as the layers of an operating system. Some levels of thinking and processing are “higher” than others, but it’s all still merely reacting to input.

Morsella’s theory seems to me to be analogous to a kind of resource-allocation process in a computer, deciding how much power or memory to give to an application, or what parts of a chip to activate and to what degree (I am not an engineer so this may be a sloppy analogy). What we think of as our consciousness may simply be a process that takes in a stimulus, and then works to figure out how to respond.

Another analogy for the conscious mind that rang true for me was by Michael Graziano, who likened our awareness to a miniature model of a battlefield for a general, complete with little tanks and soldiers, made to represent what was really out there, in order for the general to make decisions. But the general doesn’t have access to the “real” world, just the model he or she’s presented with, and has to rely on that to decide how to allocate resources.

So that’s us, isn’t it? No free will per se, no lofty sentience, just a data-crunching processer that says stop or go to a lot of other processes, relying on an incomplete simulation of the world in which it operates. No wonder we’re such a mess.

I keep starting and then deleting tweets that convey my overall feeling about the whole Trump-v-McCain slap fight going on right now. I know that if I'm not careful, I'll trip a wire. But this morning, via @VideoSawyer, I find an essay by Jim Wright that, while not a tweet, gets the point across very well. You really have to read the whole thing, because it cleverly builds to a kind of crescendo, but here's a taste of what I mean:

Donald Trump is the face of the modern Republican party.

Trump has been polling at the top of the GOP field and you’re just now figuring out what a douchebag he is? Well, that’s just plain hysterical.

Trump badmouthed old Johnny Walnuts, insulted his military service, did he?

And you’re all insulted and outraged? Heh heh, sorry Mr. Veteran, Sir. I have no idea where Little Donny learned that behavior from, no idea. Bad, Donny, bad! You apologize to this faggoty liberal pinko commie traitor right now!

Gee, I wonder where Little Donny learned those words, learned his contempt, learned to Swiftboat a veteran. Gee, I wonder.

Donald Trump is the GOP personified.

Almost as important, though, is Wright's addendum to the post, where he explains that McCain's life as a public figure is entirely fair game, that he has "no use" for the senator from Arizona, but that whatever else, "he went when called."

He may have been the bottom of his class and an admittedly poor pilot, but he met the standards and he did the job. If that's not courage, I don't know what is ...

And I keep looking for a 140-character way to say all of this, and I can't. Trump is the ideal 2015 Republican, all jingoistic bluster, and will thereby say lots and lots of awful things. One awful thing among many is this offensive nonsense diminishing the courage and years of unthinkable suffering endured by McCain when a prisoner of war. But I also want to get across a kind of gentle reminder, that as a politician -- with only the rarest of exceptions when some tiny, shriveled, death-rattle of a conscience emerges from his grizzled gray matter -- John McCain is and has been a cynical, pompous, petty, pandering, entitled, sniveling, backward, show pony who also happens to have the political media machine entirely in his pocket, a machine still under the absurd impression that he is some sort of straight-taking "maverick." (This image was as as transparently false in 1999 and 2000 as it is today, but who cares.)

John McCain, through his behavior as a politician and his enabling of the Republican noise machine, has helped make the modern GOP that now swoons at the braying of an ass like Trump.

So Donald Trump is, predictably, a detestable subhuman, as Wright says, "all 31 flavors of GOP crazy," and they deserve him. But let's not further gild the monumental pedestal, festooned with TV monitors and news tickers, upon which McCain already sits. Enduring five years of torture while in the service of one's country gives you the right to be called hero. Being insulted by Donald Trump does not. Let's keep these things separate, please.

Last week, a contact of mine at CNN asked me to write an op-ed for the website on the recent Gallup poll showing an uptick in the number of Americans who would be okay with voting for an atheist for president (now at 58%). I was delighted to be asked, and not a little bit surprised. It had to be somewhat hastily written, but the response to the piece has been great, so here's a chunk of it:

The conventional wisdom has long held that despite the constitutional guarantee of "no religious test" for public office, there could be no greater albatross for a would-be officeholder than to be identified as an atheist. ...

[But] nonbelievers have finally moved up a rung. Now claiming the space at the bottom of this particular barrel are socialists, with half of all voters ruling them out entirely. Sen. Bernie Sanders will have his work cut out for him. ...

When asked why Americans were so reluctant to back an atheist presidential candidate, the late Christopher Hitchens would say that there was a time before Ronald Reagan when no one thought a divorced, B-movie actor could be elected president, but such a candidate had to run to test the question.

So, before we can allow these poll numbers to fill the nonreligious with either hope or dread for our political prospects, we have to run the experiment.

We've seen a tiny smattering of atheist candidates and elected officials in the past handful of years, but we need to see more, and at a much higher and more visible level. The more atheist candidates run for office, whether they win or not, the more their atheism stops seeming to voters like an oddity or a novelty.

You can of course read the whole thing here. My favorite bit? The byline, of course, where it says I'm "special to CNN." Aw, CNN, you're special to me, too. Regardless of Don Lemon.

And a small bit of Paul-trivia: When I was an intern at ABC News' Political Unit, David Chalian, Teddy Davis, and Ed O'Keefe were my supervisors and colleagues (each of whom I like and respect very much). Today, they're all at CNN. Maybe I should intern for them again!

There’s been a little bit of curious excitement over a new product called Thync, a wearable module that is intended to reduce stress, induce relaxation, or energize through stimulation of the brain. Here’s how they put it:

Thync uses neurosignaling to activate specific cranial and peripheral nerves to influence this balance and shift you to a state of calm or give you a boost of energy in minutes. …

Neurosignaling is the coupling of an energy waveform to a neural structure (receptor, nerve or brain tissue) to modulate its activity.

Neurosignaling waveforms or Vibes consist of precise algorithms that bias activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, so that you can enjoy a shift into a more energetic or relaxed state.

Why yes, in case you’re curious, I also think it sounds like bullshit.

Okay, maybe bullshit is too strong a word, especially since I’m not qualified to judge the science behind it. It wouldn’t surprise me if something like this could be expected to have some kind of relaxing effects, in a way that just barely stops short of a placebo effect. Heck, even I sometimes use those “binaural waves” apps on my phone, not because I actually think it’s manipulating my brain waves, but because it makes for good white noise when I just need to shut the world out and chill for a bit.

My guess is that, at best, Thync does something like that; distracting you enough with the fact that you have a svelte, expensive doohicky on your forehead that zaps you a little. If nothing else, it’s something to think about other than whatever’s bothering you.

Kyle Russell at TechCrunch tried it out, and certainly had some sort of experience:

While I was warned that Thync might not work the first time, a few minutes into my first session (using the Calm setting) I felt a wave of sluggishness pass over me. I had some difficulty putting words into a coherent question for [Thync CEO Isy] Goldwasser, and felt a strong urge to take a nap that lasted until I got home. While I may have cranked the settings too high for my first go, the impression I got was that it would be great for falling asleep, not de-stressing at the office.

There’s a big red flag for me right at the very beginning of that quote. Why woudn’t it work the first time? Either it’s “neurosignaling to activate specific cranial and peripheral nerves” or it’s not. Unless human brains have some sort of neurosignaling-callus that needs to be worn down first, and I’m going to assume they don’t, it should just work the first time and all subsequent times.

But how does one explain Russell’s sudden onset of sluggishness? The possible factors that have nothing to do with Thync are endless, but it also seems perfectly reasonable to me that the very fact (and, frankly, stress) of having a gadget on your head that you’re told is going to zap your brain would certainly cause you to expend some mental and emotional energy, and zonk you out a bit. Russell says that the device emits “a wavy, tingly feeling on your upper forehead and the front of your scalp” that “would definitely take a few uses before it stops feeling weird.” Again, this is what I’d say is “just short of” a placebo effect. Something is happening, but not what they say is happening.

Encouragingly, Thync posts an actual test it conducted on the product. However, from my admittedy strained and untrained gleaning of the results, it didn’t seem like the Thync product induced any states that were meaningfully different from “sham treatment.” There was definitely an uptick in test subjects saying they were more relaxed than not compared to “sham,” but nothing that appeared all that convincing to me, and certainly not spend-$300-on-a-cranial-dongle convincing.

(I’d post some images of graphs from the study, but they require permission to be granted for that, and whatever.)

And here’s another thing: It seems like what Thync’s CEO tells Russell at TechCrunch is a little different than what is being sold on the website:

During the demo, Thync co-founder and CEO Isy Goldwasser explained that the module wasn’t directly stimulating neurons in my brain (that would be too damn weird for me to try, to be honest). Instead, it uses tiny pulses of electricity to stimulate the skin at your temple, which then activates the instinctual fight-or-flight response in your brain to indirectly affect emotional response.

Well, there are lots of things that can stimulate skin and activate fight-or-flight, and most of them are free.

I frankly don’t understand the science or the published study sufficiently to make any kind of authoritative judgment, but it sure smells like some kind of ophidian secretion.

A couple of sleep studies and an apnea diagnosis, and here I am in the midst of the CPAPpening. After the nasal mask failed to work out for me, it was time for something new. Tonight I try for the first time the nasal "pillows," which look like little blue earplugs or gummy candies that stick right on your nostrils. I recruited my boy, 5 years old, to help me figure it out.

At first, I was all, where does this tube go?

That seemed to miss the point. Was there something I was supposed to be listening for?

If so, I couldn't make any sense of it. So I brought the boy over, and I didn't trust what was going on in his head.

And that's when it occurred to me that this was what this device was really for: learning more about what was in my boy's head! Through my nose.

I'm sure this will all work out.

Before getting into this, you might want to catch up with some of my previous writing on Mars One:

• Mars One: Interplanetary Travel on Underpants Gnome Principles
• Mars One is Amway-Meets-Heaven’s Gate
• Here Come the Apologetics from “Some” Mars One Candidates

Okay, onward.

In an unfortunately puffy piece at The Guardian on the Mars One project, we do learn a couple of new pieces of information, which include the fact that a company called Paragon Space Development is under contract to build space suits for Mars One, and that Elon Musk has at one point expressed his willingness to sell his rockets to Mars One, but has no agreement with them (which Mars One used to imply), and Musk expresses only skepticism for the plan.

The rest of the piece more or less characterizes Mars One as a mavericky, ballsy adventure that, shucks, just might work. And it does give a sense of how the criticism of the project in recent months has only served to harden the resolve of its would-be astronauts. If any part of the Mars One scheme irritates me, it’s how it’s already tearing a rent in families and relationships over a voyage that almost certainly will never happen. And if any aspect of it disturbs me, it’s the cultification of the voyage that you can witness in the interviews with its true believers.

We also learn that the project has been almost entirely funded so far by angel investors (“30-odd rich individuals and three or four companies that don’t demand a return on their investment”), except of course for the money they squeeze from the Mars One candidates. (One bought a t-shirt!) The next round of funding, says the author, comes from the kind of folks who will expect a profit under a predetermined schedule. “The point at which Mars One can announce backing from these guys is the point at which we have no choice but to take it seriously,” the author writes, as though it’s a fact. “And that point, [CEO Bas] Lansdorp says, is close.”

Lansdorp says. He says a lot of things.

Lansdorp is still talking about “200,000” applicants, when that number has been revealed to be bogus, he’s still talking about technical limitations that “would be solved in time” with no explanation.

But look, I get it. When I first heard about Mars One, I very much wanted it to be legitimate. And who knows, maybe it will turn out to be, and I’ll eat my metaphorical hat. Or crow. Or my heart out. Whatever. And I agree with the author’s sentiment (never mind the association that does not exist between Lansdorp and Musk):

What Lansdorp, Musk and others have done is reopen a conversation that had died. Somewhere on Earth, right now, the first human to set foot on Mars is probably among us.

Now that excites me.

Cryogenics has long been the province of cranks, charlatans, and the easily-duped (I’m not a big This American Life fan, but the “Mistakes Were Made” episode is one for the ages), but its aims are right in my neurotic wheelhouse. I want the opportunity to extend my life as long as possible, but cryogenics was always a pipe dream, Captain America aside.

But hold on, folks. Because it’s not just enhanced World War II-era supersoldiers who can retain something of themselves after a lengthy deep freeze. Worms can do it too!

Here’s John Hewitt at ExtremeTech:

Two researchers, Natasha Vita-More and Daniel Barranco, have now proven for the first time that cryogenically-suspended worms retain specific acquired memories after reanimation. [ … ]

To do this, the researchers first trained the worms to move to specific areas when they smelled benzaldehyde (a component of almond oil). After mastering this new task, the worms were bathed in a glycerol-based cryoprotectant solution and put into to a deep freeze. When the worms were thawed, they remembered their job and moved to the right spot when benzaldehyde wafted in.

And this worked with two different freezing methods.

We clearly need to move on this. Fast. Defense of the homeland? The Mars program? Alaska? Forget them. Sell it all off, shut it all down, and let’s fund the shit out of this.

Then, as we continue to make Earth utterly miserable and uninhabitable, a select few of us can be frozen, and kept safe over the centuries until things, er, cool off. Then we’ll emerge from our slumbers, have all of our memories intact, and then, well, I guess we start killing each other over dominance and resources and mates and whatnot.

Wait, that went in a direction I didn’t intend.

In March of 2009, I discovered the perfect metaphor for the GOP in the animal kingdom. Now that the presidential race is getting going, and fools like Donald Trump and George Pataki and every other yahoo you can imagine is lining up for the big brawl, I thought it might be fun to revisit this six-year-old post, very much at Republicans' expense. (The original post itself is lost from the Web, but I found it in an old archive folder on my hard drive.)

Of course the references are dated (Bush was president, for one, and we still referred to the Tea Party as teabaggers), but I think the substance holds.

[Time-travel sound effects - March, 2009]

I am very much enjoying Natalie Angier’s witty science primer, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Little did I know that it would give me a brilliant insight into the decidedly nonscientific world of politics. Witness page 173, where she describes the curious behavior of one particular creature:

. . . the tunicate, or sea squirt, is a mobile hunter in its larval stage and thus has a little brain to help it find prey. But on reaching maturity and attaching itself permanently to a safe niche from which it can filter-feed on whatever passes by, the sea squirt jettisons the brain it no longer requires. “Brains are great consumers of energy,” writes Peter Atkins, a professor of chemistry at Oxford University, “and it is a good idea to get rid of your brain when you discover you have no further need of it.”

Now, am I crazy, or is this not the the perfect analogy for the modern Republican Party? After many painful years of having to “justify” “beliefs” and “policies” with “reasons” and “evidence” — all of which requires energy-consuming thought — now they have Fox News to tell them to have teabag protests for no discernible reason. The point was to be angry, not thinky.

Unfair? Okay, well, you can’t possibly argue with the sea squirt as analogous to the Bush presidency. Prizing the informational processing power of his “gut” over his brain, relying on instinct and faith over data and reflection. Bush (I assume) never physically ejected his gray matter onto the Oval Office carpet, but he might as well have. For a guy who slept as much as he did, you can bet he was looking for ways to conserve energy. What better way than to shut down a major organ he wasn’t using anyway?

There’s something sublime about this sea quirt metaphor. The GOP’s wholesale rejection of the intellect, their disdain for the educated, their anxiety over science, none of it because they are bad, per se, but because they have adapted to the environment in which they live. Finding that their brains were doing them no good whatsoever, that thoughtful, intellectual discourse was getting them nowhere, they hit the eject button and got Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, and Glenn Beck. Now they need waste no more precious energy on building neurons and firing synapses. They are a miracle of evolution.

[End time travel.]

The truth is, folks, I don’t maintain a blog purely for the joy of doing so. I do love to write, but one doesn’t blog unless one wishes not just to write, but to be read. Even on a somewhat high-profile platform like Patheos, even coming with the cred of being the mouthpiece of a major secularist organization, and of having been the substitute-Friendly-Atheist a few times, this little blog simply isn’t making much of a dent in terms of readership.

I’d like very much for that to change. There are surely lots of things I could do to make some progress: I could post more often, I could fashion my posts to be more in line with click-bait principles, I could write about things that interest a broader range of people, or conversely, write about things that drive a small number of passionate people nuts. But the fact of the matter is that I want to write what interests me, frame and express it in a way that reflects who I am, and do so as often as I am inspired to do so. Perhaps that mean I am an entitled and privileged. Go ahead, you can say it. You wouldn’t be the first.

Given all this, the best way I have found to generate at least temporary spurts of traffic is to get my material posted to sites like Reddit or into active communities on Google+. But very often, these communities and subreddits and whatnot live by an ironclad “no blogspam” rule, which means simply that they don’t want the authors of written content linking to their own stuff.

Which I get! I’m sure, given the opportunity, thousands of “bloggers” would clog up whatever feeds they could with their own material. That’s spammy, and online communities are right to police this kind of thing.

But here’s the situation I run into: I have a piece I’ve written and that I’m proud of, and I think it will resonate with a particular audience. I can go find the appropriate subreddit or Google+ community or what have you, and share it with them. But then I get a message from a moderator telling me that I’ve violated their rules against blogspam, that the post is being removed, and that I now risk being banned.

Now, if I made a habit of plastering my material willy nilly into these communities, they’d have me dead to rights. But is there no middle ground between never promoting your own material and spam? Shouldn’t there be some allowance for an author deciding that a particular piece is relevant to a particular group and sharing it? It can always be ignored or downvoted if the community in question doesn’t like it or isn’t interested. Being immediately policed seems to me to be overkill.

Again, I appreciate and share the desire to keep unscrupulous self-promoters from sullying online communities. I have to think that when one of those people come around, though, it’s pretty obvious, and that the occasional sharing of one’s own material, when relevant, is equally obvious. But since I don’t have that kind of community moderating responsibility, I could be missing something.

Maybe there’s a better way, a way that allows me to do the work I want to do and earn the attention I think it deserves. Or perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe it already is.

Transhumanist philosopher Zoltan Istvan is “running for president.” No, he’s not a supervillain, but good-god-DAMN that’s a good supervillain name. Seriously, he’s not a crank, and he knows he won’t win. And I respect the transhumanist movement even if I’m not all the way on board. Here’s part of his platform:

I’ve only focused on one thing through it all—the same thing I’ve focused on with all my work for much of the last decade: I don’t want to die.

He’s already speaking my language! Tell me more.

Like most transhumanists, it’s not that I’m afraid of death…

Oh. Well, I am. Very much so. But please continue:

…but I emphatically believe being alive is a miracle. Out of two billion planets that might have life in the universe, human beings managed to evolve, survive, and thrive on Planet Earth—enough so the species will probably reach the singularity in a half century’s time and literally become superhuman.

This is where I run into problems with transhumanism in general. I think all things being equal, I could with very few reservations plaster the label onto myself: I feel very strongly about investment in technology directed specifically to the common good, and I believe that as the only creatures we know of who can contemplate our place in the universe, we have an obligation to overcome our burdensome meat sacks and aspire to become something more. And I love this part of his platform:

We want to close economic inequality by establishing a universal basic income and also make education free to everyone at all levels, including college and preschool. We want to reimagine the American Dream, one where robots take our jobs, but we live a life of leisure, exploration, and anything we want on the back of the fruits of 21st Century progress.

But this business about being “literal” superhumans within 50 years is an issue for me. Transhumanists espouse what they call an “optimism” about the future that sounds to me a lot like magical prophecy. Here’s Istvan again:

[T]ranshumanists … want to create an artificial superintelligence that can teach us to fix all the environmental problems humans have caused.

He might as well say he wants to ask space aliens to come and solve our problems with replicator technology, or he wants to pray to the angels to sweep away all our pollution with their fiery swords. This is not a plan.

Too often, when I hear the transhumanists look to the future, it sounds too much like they want us to build our own gods and then hope (fingers crossed!) that they, who are intentionally superior to us, will want us to somehow merge with them.

Look, no one wants an Immortal Robot Body™ more than me. Death scares me shitless, and the idea of transcending it is, I think, a highly worthwhile goal. But this sounds like something else. This sounds like an attempt to create gods where none exist. It’s becoming a cargo cult even though we know exactly where the cargo is coming from.

I was relatively late to the whole Walkman thing. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I got ahold of my own portable cassette player, partly because I didn’t discover a love of contemporary music until I was 12 or so, and partly because I never thought to ask for one. (I had pretty much exhausted my enthusiasm for my Weird Al tapes, they being pretty much the only thing I ever listened to.) I don’t remember how I finally got one (a spare of my dad’s? a gift from grandma?), but when I did acquire one, and armed it with Thomas Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless, my life was changed.

Suddenly, I could remove myself from the world around me, something I as a bullied, nervous, self-loathing teen was desperate to do. In place of the hurtful, disapproving world, I could immerse myself sensorially in a rich world of melody, pathos, cleverness, and imaginativeness. It’s a cliché to say that “music saved my life,” but it’s no exaggeration to say that I was able to get through some of my most miserable years because I discovered the joys and the escape of music, enjoyed alone.

The Web and the larger online world have in many ways been the Walkman of my social existence. There was no Web to speak of when I was a teenager, but I did have Prodigy and later America Online (which I hear goes by another, shorter name now). These technologies – which included things like chat rooms, message boards, email, and later social networks – facilitated communication and interaction, yes, but from a much safer remove. There were layers of abstraction that conveniently hid most of who I was, and only let out the things I specifically authorized. I could speak, joke, argue, play, and even flirt, and never have to worry that I was being disqualified for my appearance, my clothes, or even how I simply held my body, all things that invited open mockery in meatspace. Like a personal cassette player, the online world let me enter a rich new world while also being blissfully alone.

Last month at The Awl, John Herrman wrote about “the asshole theory of technology,” which I’ll get into in a bit. He writes about the dawn of the Walkman:

Sony was worried that its portable stereo would be alienating. This turned out to be true. But the impulse to correct it was wrong: the thing that made it alienating was precisely the thing that made it good. The more compelling a gadget is, the more you use it, the more the people around you resent you for using it, the more they are pressured to use it themselves. (The fact that these devices are now all connected to each other only accelerates the effect.)

For me, I was already alienated. I needed someplace to be while alienated, a way to make use of my alienation. Music helped, and the advent of the online world was a significant leap (and iPods too). And then we got smartphones, and all of that and more became instantly available wherever I was, from a small rectangle in my pocket.

So back to this asshole theory. Herrman means to apply it to the likely success of the Apple Watch, as a new gadget for users to alienate themselves with, while simultaneously wooing the would-be-alienated:

This is the closest thing we have to a law of portable gadgetry: the more annoying it is to the people around you, the “better” the concept. The more that using it makes you seem like an asshole to people who aren’t using it, the brighter its commercial prospects. [ . . . ] It will succeed if it can create new rude exclusionary worlds for its wearers (this is why I wouldn’t underrate the weird “Taptic” communications stuff). It will succeed, in other words, to whatever extent it allows people to be assholes.

Maybe this is true for the Apple Watch, that the air of exclusiveness and elitism that it projects, and the in-crowd-only communications aspect of it, will drive its success. But the theory doesn’t work for me in terms of personal stereos, iPods, the Internet, and smartphones. I don’t care if they make me seem like an asshole (perhaps they do). I care that they get me away from all the other assholes, everywhere.

And a watch can’t do that.

Where all the galactic empires at???

This is actually not a ridiculous question. Lee Billings, an excellent science writer who specializes in the search-for-aliens beat, had a piece in Scientific American last month in which he speaks to Pennsylvania State University’s Jason Wright, an astronomer who did a novel kind of search. Rather than listen for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, a la SETI, his team instead took the temperature of about 100,000 galaxies to look for evidence of Type 3 civilizations, defined as a civilization that harvests all the energy from all the stars in an entire galaxy.

For perspective, Type 1 on this scale, the Kardashev Scale, is a civilization that has harvested all energy and resources from its home planet, and a Type 2 being one that consumes all the energy from a star. (I think it’s been posited somewhere that the Federation of Star Trek is about a Type 2, the Borg approach Type 3 status, while we contemporary humans live in a Type 0.7 civilization or so.) One guess is that this would be done by use of a “Dyson Sphere,” encapsulating an entire star in some sort of structure that harvests 100 percent of its energy. A Type 3 would do the same thing, but to an entire galaxy.

You think you’d notice something like that going on, right? Right. And they can’t find any.

“On Kardashev’s scale, a type 3 civilization uses energy equal to all the starlight produced by one galaxy,” Wright says. That would equate to an infrared-bright galaxy seemingly bereft of stars. “We looked at the nearest, largest 100,000 galaxies we could find in the [WISE] Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer] catalogue and we never saw that. One hundred thousand galaxies and not one had that signature. We didn’t find any type 3s in our sample because there aren’t any.”

Even if advanced civilizations do not build Dyson spheres, Wright’s null result also applies to any other energy-intensive “astroengineering” taking place at galactic scales.

I suppose this is somewhat discouraging, but it also isn’t all that surprising. My little brain can barely process even the imaginary idea of a civilization of such scope and power, so the fact that none turned up in a big survey doesn’t shock me. I don’t know if 100,000 galaxies counts as a statistically viable sample of all the galaxies in the universe, but I’d have to guess that if there were any Type 3s out there, they’d be so rare as to elude even such wide nets.

And, frankly, if there’s a civilization that’s powerful enough to eat up a galaxy, and close enough for us to detect it, I’d be a little worried that this civ might get an appetite for a Milky Way.

But Wright says they’re just not there, at all. Fine. But even if he’s right, it only rules out one kind of pan-galactic civ. There may be more than one way to rule a galaxy:

Drawing from Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quip that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” in 2011 the science fiction author Karl Schroeder coined an all-too-plausible reason for the apparent absence of aliens: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” In this view the future of technology would not consist of star-hopping civilizations spreading like wildfire through galaxies, disassembling planets and smothering suns, but rather of slow-growing cultures becoming more and more integrated with their natural environments, striving for ever-greater efficiencies and coming ever-closer to thermodynamic equilibrium. Simply put, profligate galaxy-spanning empires are unsustainable and therefore we do not see them. “SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products,” Schroeder has written. “Waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals—we merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.”

If there’s anything about the idea of things like Dyson Spheres that doesn’t ring true to me as a prospect for future tech, it’s how utterly industrial it is. It comes from a time when what we thought of as high-tech was giant computer mainframes and huge, powerful rockets. Freeman Dyson came up with the idea before we even had Star Wars and Star Trek, which themselves imagined a future with behemoth city-like starships, gargantuan space stations, and near-instant terraforming of worlds (and, eventually, the hyper-industrial Borg). For the idea of a Dyson Sphere, we have a massive industrial enterprise, the ultimate public works project, with structures of presumably enormous size and power forming a lattice or shell around an entire star or galaxy, sucking up the energy and venting out the waste.

It just seems, well, a little low-tech, doesn’t it?

I can’t speak to its relative probability, but Karl Schroeder’s view of a an advanced civilization integrating with, rather than consuming, its habitat makes more sense, especially if said civilization has managed to last long enough to get to this advanced stage. Any civilization that’s been machining its way up the Kardashev Scale might be more likely to exhaust its available resources more quickly, as opposed to a civilization that emphasizes equilibrium over growth. In this scenario, tech is small, geared to consume as little energy as possible, and population levels are more or less static, and there exists no drive to be fruitful, multiply, and conquer.

For Kardashev’s sake, how would we distinguish these two lines of civilizational ascent? Perhaps the numbers (Types 1 through 3 and so on) represent a Kardashev Industrial Scale, based on production and growth, while the other is the Kardashev Integrative Scale (or the Schroeder Scale?) based on ecological equilibrium and cultural advancement, signified with letters (Types A, B, C, and so on, where we modern humans would be very much sub-A).

Of course, we’d never be able to detect civs advanced on the Integrative Scale, unless they wanted to be detected, or reached out to us themselves. And since a hallmark of their advanced state is their utter lack of waste, it’s hard to see why they’d want to.

Smug hippies.

[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZI9D31n-KA])

In Switzerland, they've got themselves a virtual mouse (like, a rodent that exists in a computer, not like a peripheral that controls a cursor), complete with a software reconstruction of a mouse brain. Remember how mere hours ago I was writing about how New Zealand's new law declaring animals to be sentient was tied, in my mind, to what we might have to consider in terms of artificial intelligence, or put another way, software-based animals? Well, it's all here.

Reuters reports:

Scientists around the world mapped the position of the mouse brain's 75 million neurons and the connections between different regions. The virtual brain currently consists of just 200,000 neurons - though this will increase along with computing power. [Scientist Mark-Oliver] Gewaltig says applying the same meticulous methods to the human brain, could lead to computer processors that learn, just as the brain does. In effect, artificial intelligence.

GEWALTIG: "If you look at the neurobotics platform, if you want to control robots in a similar way as organisms control their bodies; that's also a form of artificial intelligence, and this is probably where we'll first produce visible outcomes and results."

For shits and giggles, let's say this isn't in Switzerland, but in New Zealand. You know where I'm going with this.

At what point is that virtual mouse no longer "virtual," but sentient...sentient under the law?

Is it already?

New Zealand has passed an amendment to its animal welfare law stating that animals are “sentient beings,” and the amendment seems to strengthen some measures that define how or in what situation an animal can be used for various purposes, such as medical experimentation. That’s good!

Though it’s not clear from the bill itself (as far as I can tell) what it means by “sentient.” No language in the wording of the bill spells it out, nor does it specify which animals possess sentience. The little bit of bloggy news coverage I’ve seen (all of which might as well be copy-and-paste jobs of each other) suggests the simple definition of the ability to percieve things, having feelings, and the ability to suffer. That doesn’t help me, really. I don’t mean to presume that this hasn’t been flushed out by the relevant parties, I have no idea, but I sure as hell don’t think I could say for sure to what degree, say, a mouse feels or suffers versus, say, a chimpanzee.

Because there has to be degrees of sentience, right? If sentience were a binary thing, then we’d have a much bigger problem on our hands, with trillions of members of millions of species all now declared to have “feelings” and “perception” just “like humans.” So I have to assume that New Zealand is not now offering asylum to fruit flies or making illegal the squashing of ants. We can be mostly certain they don’t have “feelings” (like, I dunno, jealousy?), but don’t ask me whether or not they “suffer.”

I don’t mean to make light of this, truly. I do think this is a good thing, but it strikes me as vague and ill-defined. The group Animal Equality (equality? really? you sure?) calls it a “monumental step forward for animals,” and I think that’s overselling it. We’re not talking about personhood, but rather what sounds more like a general sense-of-the-government quasi-resolution kind of thing, saying that we all need to be way more mindful about how we treat the other animal species we share the planet with, particularly those we breed and harvest and manipulate for our benefit.

That stipulated, its very nebulousness may be its saving grace. By virtue of being vague and undefined, it may force some very difficult and very necessary conversations, questions, and debates. For if there’s a questionable practice that seems to inhabit a grey area, or something being done to an animal whose “sentience” is not terribly clear, this new law may spur some very crucial arguments. Regardless of how those arguments are resolved, the conversation about our fellow creatures is suddenly elevated, given more gravity. All parties, then, get the benefit of having thought harder and longer about something we’ve had the privilege to take for granted since we first started domesticating.

One small step further, if you’ll allow, because with this discussion I can’t help but be reminded of the hearing over Data’s personhood on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Picard tells the Judge Advocate General:

[T]he decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom, expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery?

The bill specifies animals, so this line of thought is probably moot for the news at hand, but think of artificial intelligence. At what point to we consider a machine or some software to be capable of “perceiving.” Don’t they already? When do we consider them to be “feeling”? When they tell us? When do we consider them to be “suffering”? Ever? As long as that’s never written into their programming?

One day, and maybe one day very soon, we’re going to need some law for that. And unlike animals, the artificial intelligence might ask us for it.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

There are no good photo management solutions for the Mac anymore. Yeah, I said it! At least, I've seen none that satisfy the few but crucial needs that are specific to me. And it’s my blog, so I don’t see what else could possibly matter.

Here’s what we’ve got now. Apple has recently released the first version of its new Photos app for Mac, and it’s not working for me. First, it’s been developed with the assumption that you own at least one iOS device, and its syncing-through-iCloud feature is marquee. Marquee, and inapplicable to me as a happy Android user. This emphasis is not technically a "flaw," but I presume they’re aware that not all Mac users are also iPhone or iPad users. I also presume they just don't give a shit. And from all I’ve read, the iCloud syncing aspect of it is a black box. It allocates what photos live on your local hard disk and which don’t in order to preserve space, but not in any way that users have any direct control over. You just have to trust Apple to get it right. Ahem.

But seriously, it sounds like a time bomb of sadness to me.

That aside, how does it function simply as a photo management tool for my machine? Meh. It’s got some nice features, it’s clean and fast, and all that’s great. But its editing features are strangely tucked away. They’re very good editing features, but you can’t remain in an editing mode once you’ve finished with an individual photo. You can click edit, do your adjustments, save them, and then you’re booted out of editing mode. You can’t just advance to the next photo and keep working. I think that stinks. It’s a huge waste of time that serves no purpose other than Apple’s overall philosophical stance that normals shouldn’t even bother editing photos. You shot them with an iPhone 6 after all, right? They’ll be perfect anyway. Ahem.

Also, it began geolocating many of my photos, taken at home or close to home in Maine, as though they were taken in Afghanistan. I shit you not. A bug, of course, which is fixable, and we all know how good Apple is at fixing bugs lately. Ahem.

So I don’t like it.

I’ve migrated back to iPhoto, which I also don’t like, but at least it’s the devil I know. It’s godawful slow, and its editing features are sparse and clunky, but at least once you’re editing you can stay editing. But it’s also a black box, storing everything in a package file called “iPhoto Library” which you can technically crack open from the Finder, but you really shouldn’t.

There’s also Google+’s photos feature, which I really, really like, but it’s not a desktop photo management app, it’s a web service more akin to Flickr. There’s no file system, and everything is stored on the cloud. I love its editing features, I like the interface, and I like the stuff it does automatically. But it’s not an application on my computer, and it doesn’t manage my local copies. So that’s not it.

There’s Google’s Picasa, which I have switched in and out of at various points. It’s closer to what I like, giving you an eye to the file system your photos live in, but presenting them in a manageable and mostly-friendly way. Editing is very easy, and it’s pretty fast. But it’s also a little byzantine if you have a large library with photos spanning various directories, and it’s easy to get lost. It’s very hard to share outside of Picasa, and you can’t even drag a photo out of its viewer to do something with it outside the app.

Oh, and it’s been more or less abandoned by Google, despite the very-occasional maintenance update. It was intended as a desktop interface to the Picasa web service which, of course, nobody uses, and has also been abandoned. It’s a very old app, and it looks it.

There are more “pro” apps like Adobe Lightroom, but I don’t have the scratch for that kind of thing, and my limited dabbling with it and similar apps lead me to similar conclusions: Too complex for what I want.

Here’s what I do want. I want something that uses the existing file system as its basis, something that doesn’t tuck all the photo files away in a mysterious package that will explode if you touch it. I want to know what is and is not on my computer, easily and obviously. I want editing features that are easy to jump in and out of quickly. This one will be controversial: I want destructive editing, meaning I don’t want multiple versions of any photo I work on. If I change it, I want it changed, and not have other versions taking up space (save for temporary caches for those “oh shit I didn’t mean to do that” moments). I want the system to be mirrored on a cloud-based service so that I can use the app mostly full-featured from a browser. I want it to be easy to share to any social network or app I choose.

Nothing I know of does all of this. This doesn’t mean such an app-service combo doesn’t exist, but I’ve not found it. I’m sure a lot of my wish list betrays my age and the baggage of 90s-era computing, but again, this is my blog, not yours, you damned millennials. But you could say that what I want is a well-maintained, prettier Picasa-Google+ hybrid with free and open sharing capabilities.

This may be too much to ask in a world where both Google and Apple are doing all they can to lock you to their ecosystems through a mobile-first paradigm, where the phone is the primary actor in all things photographic.

I could maybe be happy just with circa–2005-era iPhoto. I know I was happier with it.

My wife Jessica dug up this old SNL clip today, and I love it.

Let me tell you why I love it.

First, Sally Field commits. This is not some half-baked celebrity-host cue-card phone-in. She becomes this Jesus-loving woman entirely. It's just grand.

Second, Phil Hartman is the perfect Jesus. Not because he "looks the part" or anything, it's that he manages to pull off the perfect blank-slate-Jesus. There is no figure in fiction or fact who comes with more cultural baggage than Jesus Christ, and yet somehow Hartman manages to fulfill both the theological/cultural expectations of the character, without inserting any unnecessary commentary on Jesus or Christianity. He's not the South Park Jesus, or some hypocrite Jesus. He's just Jesus, writ-large.

Third, the sketch isn't based on being mean or snarky. It takes a stock character, the Jesus-obsessed mom and lends it a funny twist, but never turns her into a fool or a jerk. There is a love for the character despite her flaws.

[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvWFqrKcsU&w=500&h=281])