Dave Pollard: Science

SALON WATCH

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 19:39:06 GMT

Our 'parent' magazine, Salon , continues to sustain its reputation for quality, insightful analysis and investigative journalism. Here are just four recent examples that show why Salon is the best magazine in the world right now, and why we need to do everything possible to help keep it going:

Take Back the Airwaves: In The Myth of Interference , David Weinberger interviews Internet architect David Reed about the radiomagnetic spectrum. Key message: With appropriate technology, the communications spectrum, the bandwidth of the airwaves, is unlimited. There is no need to license it (or worse, privatize it), if we allow users to develop software that can parse it into infinitely smaller sections, and open the airwaves up to anyone and everyone that is able to operate in a sufficiently small part of the spectrum that they essentially do not 'interfere' with anyone else. We must take back the airwaves before they are privatized, or communications technology innovation will grind needlessly to a halt, and what should be 'public' property will be gone forever.
The Illogic of War in Iraq: In Briefing for a Descent into Hell , Fred Branfman posits an imaginary conversation with an alien visitor who shows, objectively and hilariously, the insanity of the Iraq war and much of the rest of the Bush agenda.
Bill Moyers on Bush: In a Salon Interview with Bill Moyers , Andrew O'Hehir draws out the tactful and grizzled media veteran to admit that he fears Bush and his 'cronies' threaten the very fabric of American democracy. He also talks about 'right-wing hegemony', growing inequality, the environment, and chicken feet.
Consumer Mind Control: In Madison Avenue & Your Brain , Matthew Blakeslee explains how advertisers use your own physical and neurological responses to make you want to but what you don't need. Good accompaniment to my most recent post .

A DIAGNOSIS FOR GULF WAR SYNDROME

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 23:05:47 GMT

There's been a lot of discussion lately about depleted uranium as an unlikely cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Now it appears there may be an explanation of why so many Gulf War vets, and so many Iraqi civilians, have come down with symptoms consistent with chemical poisoning. The New Scientist reports that as much as 10% of the population has a sensitivity to even miniscule traces of chemicals, and that as a result they suffer permanent brain damage with as much as a whiff of these substances. This susceptibility is exacerbated by stress, which is why, proponents of the theory say, it is so prevalent in war areas and war situations. This same 10% have negative reactions to the drug pyridostigmine given to U.S. troops during the Gulf War (and also in this war) to increase their resistance to nerve agents.

This, of course, raises interesting ethical questions. If chemical weapons used by both sides in a war leave 90% of combatants and civilians unaffected but debilitate or kill the other 10%, is their use justifiable, and who's responsible for reparations?

CHOMSKY ON POLITICS AND LANGUAGE

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 20:01:36 GMT

Since language and politics are two of the blogosphere's favourite topics, readers might like to know that there's a profile of Noam Chomsky that deals with both subjects in this week's New Yorker (not available, alas, in the online edition ).

Chomsky has recently alienated many of his supporters on the political left. He refuses, for example, to talk about his opposition to war in terms of morality, and focuses purely on whether it is reasonable to achieve the intended result. His opposition to the war on Iraq is therefore predicated on these 'facts': (a) Few countries have ever (and America has never) successfully replaced a country's regime with one more acceptable to the people of that country. Only internal, civil revolutions have been successful in doing this (e.g. Marcos, Duvalier, Suharto, Ceausescu). (b) Iraq is an artificial construct imposed by the British, which means the only regimes likely to find enduring favour with the local populace are those that the U.S. could not tolerate (e.g. a Shiite muslim state closely allied with the similar state in Iran, and a Kurdish state allied with a break-away Turkish Kurdish state). Chomsky was recently in Turkey using his influence for the successful release of a Kurdish journalist charged with treason (for publishing Chomsky's articles condemning Turkey's treatment of the Kurds).

Chomsky seems to be as inept in many of his actions as he is brilliant in his thoughts. He inadvertently lent his name and his credibility to an anti-Semitic tract when he defended the author's rights to free speech (his quote appeared as an 'endorsement' on the offensive book's cover). His book on 9/11 has been vilified for its moral indifference: He compared the 9/11 attacks to Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant (the U.S. suspected it was a chemical weapons plant, and because of the error several thousand people died as a result of not getting their medicines). Regardless of intent or morality, he argued, neither attack could reasonably have been expected to have accomplished its objectives with minimal risk, so they were equally indefensible.

He has alienated many people in his field of linguistics as well. He has radically changed his basic thinking on the subject three times, each time turning his back contemptuously on supporters of his previous theories. He still believes that language is hard-wired in the brain (which is why babies learn it so easily, and 'wild children' who don't learn language by adolescence spend the rest of their lives illiterate and culturally disconnected from the rest of the human race). He believes all human languages are intimately connected and remarkably and inevitably alike, although he has seemingly given up on the holy grail of a universal 'proto-language' or syntax. A passionate anti-behaviouralist, he thinks it possible that language could yet prove to be a Gouldian 'spandrel', an accident of human evolution that arose as a side-effect of some more 'purposeful' evolutionary development.

The article left me with two unanswered questions:

Is Chomsky's 'rational', morally neutral approach to looking at political events and public policy better or worse than approaches that invoke morality, humanity, and altruism?
Is Chomsky a linguistic speciesist, blinded by his narrow study of human language to believe that only humans have sophisticated, 'hard-wired' innate language ability, and hence reasoning and cognition? If he studied dolphins or ravens would he really come to understand what language and consciousness and reason is, how and why they evolved and what they're for?

Anyone have any thoughts on these two issues, or other thoughts about Chomsky? Seems to me this might be diablogue material. What do we make of his incredible worldwide popularity, everywhere except in the U.S.? And what should we make of his wife's weary comment that when he's asked what to do about everything that's wrong, he 'fakes' an answer rather than admit he has none?

Post-script: Since I'm pimping the New Yorker, I should note that the magazine cover I reproduced on my To Be Nobody But Yourself post (also on Monday) was, by an amazing coincidence, featured in this week's New Yorker vintage cover collection ad. I now know the artist's name: Charles E. Martin, and the date of initial publication, 1971. You can buy it, as I'm going to do, from their Cartoon Bank .

OPEN SOURCE UTOPIA

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 16:53:54 GMT

Part 1: Designing a Nation

Recently Adam Greenfield proposed an open-source collaborative project to develop a manual for the (re-)construction of a nation. The premise is that no group of bureaucrats, military strategists and civil servants can possibly know how to rebuild a country, especially one whose citizens may have never known democracy, freedom, rule of law, or any of the other constructs that we think are essential to the functioning of a civil state. No one has been able to impose (Afghanistan) or quickly and painlessly evolve (ex-Soviet states) a nation-model that works. Even the best current systems have taken centuries of war, intermittant misery and inequity to emerge and are wildly imperfect and fragile.

So the idea is: Design an open-source model using collaborative tools. Let all the people affected participate in its creation, so it's right for the culture and evolutionary state of those who have to live with it. Let those who think they have the answers write chapters or constitutions or bills of rights or judicial frameworks and submit them for immediate response, editing and referenda by the citizens.

I think it's a wonderful idea. Now all we have to do is try it out in Afghanistan by setting up a mass of computers in communities around the country, equipped with multi-lingual collaborative and learning tools and facilitators to enable it to happen. Think Bill Gates might chip in for this? And, of course, the 'conquering nations' need to pony up the money needed to rebuild and bootstrap the infrastructure and institutions required by the people's design. That's a taller order.

Part 2: Designing The Future State for Earth

This idea got me thinking about the possibility of using blogspace to write a novel. I've already written the set-up chapter for a utopian novel, and skeleton descriptions of its twelve characters. The plan was to write twelve additional chapters, each written from the perspective of one of the characters. The novel is set in an Edenic future where, after a major viral plague, man has finally learned his place in the world and lives in peace with all the planet's creatures. It's not a cautionary tale. Instead, the idea is to show what's possible on our beleaguered planet if we were to deal with the underlying causes of the problems (e.g. overpopulation, lack of education etc.) instead of their symptoms (war, crime etc.) In business this type of construct is called a Future State Vision.

It occurred to me that these fictional characters' stories might be richer and more believable if the chapters were actually written by different people. I've heard of other collaborative creative exercises working well (a superb example is Jonathan Elias' Prayer Cycle , which features overlays by Alanis Morissette, Salif Keita and other musicians from all over the world overlaying native-language vocal tracks on Elias' multi-lingual adagio compositions; the artists apparently never met in person).

Advice, or lessons from other collaborative non-pornographic writing exercises, would be welcome.

PICKING A FUEL-EFFICIENT HYBRID CAR

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 12:57:26 GMT

UCS has a thorough new report on how to select from the new breed of fuel-efficient hybrid cars . Excerpt:

Using new research into the cost and performance of hybrid technology, this report provides a comprehensive assessment of the technology, the fuel economy, and the costs associated with a fleet of passenger cars and trucks that rely on hybrid technology to more than double the fuel economy commonly available today. If they are designed well, these hybrids can equal or better the utility, comfort, performance, and safety we've come to expect, while saving us thousands of dollars at the gas pump.

You can also download a consumer's guide to buying a greener vehicle.

EARTH OBSERVATORY

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 18:47:44 GMT

Yahoo Science today publicized NASA's site that contains hundreds of high-resolution pictures of Earth from space, some of them so remarkably detailed you can pick out individual streets and houses. It's called Earth Observatory and it would be doing it a gross disservice to use a thumbnail shot in this post to exemplify its contents. Just go visit it, see the smoke trail from the Staten Island refinery fire (click on the 'large view' link), or the Etna eruption, or the Australian bush fires. These photos are breathtaking. I'm hanging up my Nikon.

ON HYDROGEN, FASCISM AND POWELL'S VIEW OF VIETNAM

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 17:05:38 GMT

AlterNet explains why hydrogen is not , at least in the short run, a clean or renewable energy alternative, and may in fact detract from important renewable energy programs already getting traction.

In the International Herald Tribune, 80-year-old Norman Mailer weighs in with a warning that the U.S. has already attained a "pre-fascistic atmosphere" and that, alas, fascism, not democracy, may be the natural state for nations.

Robert Scheer brings to our attention this remarkable excerpt from Colin Powell 's 1995 autobiography:

"I recently read Bernard Fall's book on Vietnam, 'Street Without Joy.' Fall makes painfully clear that we had almost no understanding of what we had gotten ourselves into. I cannot help thinking that if President Kennedy or President Johnson had spent a quiet weekend at Camp David reading that perceptive book, they would have returned to the White House Monday morning and immediately started to figure out a way to extricate us from the quicksand of Vietnam."

MEANWHILE, IN OTHER NEWS

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 15:56:27 GMT

The U.S. supreme court just sent the case of a black Texas death row inmate back to a lower court, ruling that the judge and the lower court unfairly allowed systematic racial bias in jury selection to go unchallenged. Three guesses who the only dissenting judge was?

The Economist reports a breakthrough in fibre optics (subscriber-only story) called Photonic Crystal Fibres (PCFs) , which may enable tremendous advances in the miniaturization of testing equipment, increased efficiency and longevity of fibre cabling, and the manipulation of single atoms.

In the search for blame for accounting regularities of Royal Ahold NV , the world's third largest retailer, which resulted in restatements of at least $500 million and the collapse of Ahold's share price, the BBC says the problem may lie in loose regulations governing foreign operations of Dutch parent companies. Many companies base their global or European operations in the Netherlands for tax reasons and to simplify regulatory requirements. The discrepancies involve overbooking of promotional allowances (amounts kicked back to the retailer by suppliers for promotion of their brands) in U.S. and possibly South American operations.

THE COST OF RENEWABLE ENERGY

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 01:00:33 GMT

The WorldWatch Institute, publishers of the annual State of the World report, holds weekly conferences on various environmental and 'sustainable development' topics. This week the topic was Renewable Energy, and the transcript is available here . One of the questions was about the cost of various renewable sources and the potential for even cleaner sources to become affordable. The answer:

The cost of generating energy with renewable technologies varies from one technology to the next and from one location to another, depending on the available resources. Wind energy is now the cheapest, at 4-6 cents per kilowatt hour in good sites - and this is a conservative estimate as some producers are now signing contracts for under 3 cents/kWh. Biomass in the U.S. is about 7-9 cents/kWh, and photovoltaics generally range from 25-50, depending on location. First of all, hydrogen and biofuels, pumped storage, etc. are not mutually exclusive, and renewable energy and fuels can be used to produce hydrogen. Worldwatch believes that hydrogen offers tremendous potential for the future. Hydrogen can be used to generate electricity and to fuel transportation; it can be stored and transported. It would facilitate the transition from the consumption of limited, non-renewable polluting fossil fuels to unlimited renewable resources. Hydrogen is clean burning, and if it is produced with renewable energy it avoids the significant external costs associated with the extraction, transport, refining, and burning of fossil fuels. As you mention, hydrogen production is relatively expensive today and we need to develop the proper infrastructure. But costs are expected to decline dramatically over coming years, particularly as governments and industry in the U.S., Japan and the European Union are committed to investing large amounts of money in research and development for hydrogen production and the infrastructure necessary for its transport and use.

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTIE. WELL, MY QUANTUM STATES ANYWAY.

Wed, 19 Feb 2003 21:20:30 GMT

MIT reports this week that Danish and Swiss researchers have successfully teleported photons a distance of 55 meters, and expect commercial applications within a few years.

THE DEMON IN THE FREEZER

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 18:18:51 GMT

I highly recommend Richard Preston's investigative report into the Anthrax scare and the dangers of Smallpox as a WMD, The Demon in the Freezer , his first book since The Hot Zone, which explained Ebola and related viruses and how close they came to infecting the U.S.

Preston's work is terrifying, all the more because his details of incompetence and carelessness in the handling of these lethal substances have not been refuted by any of the officials and scientists explicitly named in his books. It is also fascinating, because he delves into the history of these diseases and unearths some astonishing facts that I've never seen in the media. For example:

When the Anthrax scare occurred, top scientists, epidemiologists and security forces immediately wanted to know one thing above all else: was the weaponized (separated into extremely fine, airborne particles, a highly sophisticated process) Anthrax used as a carrier for Smallpox ? Whereas as we now know weaponized Anthrax spreads very rapidly, it can be a very effective carrier for Smallpox, which is much, much more contageous and lethal than Anthrax. The two in combination would, according to Preston, be almost impossible to stop.
The U.S. destroyed almost all its Smallpox vaccine in the 1970s after the disease was officially eradicated worldwide, and after the USSR (which was largely responsible for eradication of the disease in the Third World) and U.S. jointly agreed to minimize and contain all remaining samples in a few locations, subject to mutual inspection and verification. They then discovered that after the collapse of the USSR large amounts of weaponized Smallpox went, and remain, missing. Reliable intelligence suggests many countries remain in possession of Smallpox, much of it collected before the 1970s by local medical authorities for research into its eradication. Smallpox is easy to amplify (replicate), so not much is needed to create a lot.
Immunization for Smallpox is a dangerous process, since a significant proportion of the population cannot take the vaccine (e.g. those with immune deficiency or some common skin ailments), and some people immunized actually get the disease anyway.
Smallpox is just one of thousands of related Pox diseases that affect almost every form of life on Earth. Were it not for the existence of insect Poxes, for example, some insects would multiply so quickly that they would extinguish many other forms of life and unbalance the web of life in a matter of weeks before starvation could bring their numbers under control. Many forms of life on Earth are affected by more than one kind of Pox, but each Pox efficiently and effectively targets only one species. Since they only spread rapidly in large, like populations in close proximity, Poxes are, in a real sense, God's natural 'population control' mechanism.
There is a raging debate in the scientific community on whether Poxes from one species can evolve over time, or be 'repurposed', to target another species. So even if all the Smallpox remaining in the world (all of it, except the U.S. and Russian supplies, officially illegal) were somehow tracked down and eradicated, the risk could well remain. Why the U.S. and Russia have insisted on keeping samples of the disease when it is not needed to create the vaccine (the vaccine actually comes from Cowpox, which is harmless, at least for now in its current state, to humans) has not been satisfactorily answered.
Some people seem to be naturally immune to viruses like Smallpox and the Plague. The theory is that, by Darwinian selection in the middle ages when bubonic and pneumonic Plague swept the Earth, most of the survivors had this naturally immunity, and their heirs now make up a significant portion of the Western population. Some even say that this Plague immunity also conveys immunity to AIDS, and had it not been for the Black Plague epidemic, the death toll from AIDS in Europe and the Americas would have been vastly higher.

Something to think about to take your mind off North Korea and Iraq (oops, no, they both reportedly bought Smallpox from the Russians and/or the CIA when they were allies of those countries).

IDEAS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE - AN UNSUNG CHAMPION

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 20:30:38 GMT

Yet another major war zone between corporations and citizens (I've already ranted this week about corporate power and 'free' trade) is over intellectual property rights. There is strong evidence (more on this soon) that most new intellectual property laws hurt innovation, hurt the poor, and really benefit only a small elite group of large corporations and their armies of lawyers. There's one guy, Stanford Law School prof Lawrence Lessig, who's fighting the good fight for all of us that didn't even know (at least on this matter) we were at war. Here's his blog. Read it, and tell him his work is appreciated.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/

HOW TO CONVINCE THE MEDIA YOU'RE A TERRORIST

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 19:38:26 GMT

Interesting snippet from John Gehl's great 'Above the Fold' IT-e-newsletter today on how easy it was for a journalist to con Computerworld into thinking one of their correspondents was the Slammer worm hyper-terrorist:
Although it violates journalistic ethics for a reporter to misrepresent his identity, freelance journalist Brian McWilliams (whose work has appeared in Salon and Wired News) used a fake Web site and phony ID to deceive Computerworld's Dan Verton into believing that he was a Pakistan-based terrorist who unleashed the recent Slammer network worm on the world. Computerworld published, then quickly retracted, Verton's story. McWilliams says he wanted to teach reporters "to be more skeptical of people who claim they're involved in cyber-terrorism." Computerworld editor-in-chief Maryfran Johnson says, "I couldn't believe a journalist could do this to another journalist," and Verton says, "I feel like I've been had, and that's never an easy thing to swallow. So, I'm left here scratching fleas as the price you sometimes pay for sleeping with dogs." (AP/San Jose Mercury News 7 Feb2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5127584.htm