The Continuing Decline Of Western Civilization ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do not look at the Old Ones, for they will steal your sanity Couple of things for which I've not the time to write lengthy analysis. Edward at Obsidian Wings has a post up about The High-Tech Scarlet Letter which I find myself agreeing with. Regardless of the crime, this public parade of humiliation is barbarous, equivalent to a village stoning. Bush has pushed through 17 recess appointees, people so unqualified that he doesn't even trust a Senate controlled by his own party to confirm them. The list is here. Via TPM. Josh Marshall informs us that Andrea Mitchell has suggested that journalist Christiane Amanpour may have been among those targeted by warrentless NSA surveillance. No confirmation, and the transcript has been removed from the NBC site, but there has been confirmation that NBC is investigating the allegation. The question is, who had to mention this for NBC to take it seriously? Josh suggests that only a government source would be sufficient. Finally, from TPM Cafe, Jane Harman (D-CA), ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a member of the 'Gang of Eight' has sent a letter to the White House. She says she has come to believe that briefing only select members of the intelligence committees violates the National Security Act of 1947, and reiterates the request for a full committee briefing. posted by tcdowc - 6:27 pm - 01.05.06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is no Dana, only Zu'ul Pat Robertson has confirmed it: Sharon has been struck down by the mighty hand of a wrathful God for dividing the holy lands of Israel. Fear and tremble! For the end-times are upon us all, and the heathens and unbelievers shall be delivered unto the Lake of Fire and Aneurysms. Lo, and the Lord spake:
add to the discussion - 0 entries posted by tcdowc - 5:54 pm - 01.05.06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Danger Will Robinson, Danger! Edge, the world question center, has released its 2006 question, with answers from a hundred-odd respected scientists from various fields. The question: What is your most dangerous idea? Yeah, I didn't immediately think that this was such a great question, but then I read some answers and got schooled. The list has something for everyone, and it's worth reading if only because it might make you smarter (which is probably a first for anything linked from this site). The answers (scroll down for a bit to get to them) can be quite long, so I certainly haven't finished read them all yet, but my favorite so far is from Paul Ewald, director of evolutionary biology at U of L. His idea is that we have in hand (or near to hand) most of the information to bring about a new Golden Age in medicine. And it may not happen: The transition to this golden age, however, requires two things: a shift in research effort to identifying the pathogens that cause the major diseases and development of effective interventions against them. The first would be easy to bring about by restructuring the priorities of NIH � where money goes, so go the researchers. The second requires mechanisms for putting in place programs that cannot be trusted to the free market for the same kinds of reasons that Adam Smith gave for national defense. The goals of the interventions do not mesh nicely with the profit motive of the free market. Vaccines, for example, are not very profitable. Other answers include God as an evolutionary trait in humans, the absence of a soul, evil as an evolutionary trait, the threat posed by 'citizen's (pseudo)science' and the idea that science is running out of control, moral intuition as a poor guide to moral truth, and dangerous ideas themselves (this last one is quite good). UPDATE: I just wanted to add that these are not peer-reviewed, or anything like that. They aren't necessarily even hypothesis. This is just people who think for a living thinking aloud. UPDATE II: Still reading through these, about a 1/4 of the way now, and I thought that I'd add a few more ineresting bits. Climate change does not imperil the planet, it's been through worse and will recover; it greatly endangers people. The human brain is a cultural artifact. The Islamicist idea of the decadent West may be true. add to the discussion - 0 entriesposted by tcdowc - 5:39 pm - 01.04.06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mission Accomplished - Victory In The War On Christmas! Argh, I wrote this whole thing about data-mining and why you need oversight: because you can never have anything approaching certainty that anyone tagged by a data-mining operation really is guilty of anything. But it was filled with examples that were boring, so I erased it. Matthew Yglesias says that it's all about the numbers, and it's a pretty good point. Even if the programs have excellent error rates, they will generate false positives. And the more people in the net, the more false positives that will be generated. Yglesias posits a ten percent error rate, but considering the number of languages involved that seems pretty generous. This is not a cheap operation. Beyond the enormous development costs for the technology, there's a massive expenditure on servers and routers involved, as well as the human resources that have to be devoted not only to maintenance and development but to follow-up research. So the question is, how effective is this program, vs. traditional surveillance, and is it the best way to allocate our limited resources? Will it catch some terrorists? Yes, it probably will. Will it target far more innocents? Yes, it probably will. Will it eat up a lot of resources? Unquestionably. Secret programs that are accountable only to the President are not only unaccountable for infringements of civil liberties; they are unaccountable in terms of effectiveness as well. add to the discussion - 0 entriesposted by tcdowc - 10:00 pm - 01.03.06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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