Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Annotated chess

Traditional chess is played in a strict and silent way, with harsh procedures like the touch-move rule.

I sometimes enjoy playing in a radically different way, with the options for each move openly discussed and considered. There is no possibility for cunning traps, but I think it is an educational process. Every person considers the board a bit differently, and the insights which they share might be things that would not have occurred to you during silent solitary strategizing.

The recollection of those insights will probably also help during more competitive play.

It can also be pleasant and useful to allow moves to be made in an experimental way, just to see how the board would look in the new configuration. Does the move produce any unexpected consequences? You can wander a bit down one of the branches of the game tree – for the purposes of thought and discussion – then step back and choose an official move.

Disaggregated data

About a week ago, I attended a discussion session and social event on ‘data journalism’. To a large degree, it was about converting datasets, many of them collected from governments, into news stories of interest to the general public. You can take crime data, for instance, and process it into a form with a lot of general appeal. The same goes for education, transport, and other topics.

One general point that the discussion reminded me of is the importance of aggregated versus disaggregated data. For example, saying that the average income in Happytown is $75,000 is quite different from providing the individual data points for every person in the town. If you give someone the first piece of data, all they can really do is report it and compare it with similar statistics. If you give them the disaggregated data, they can do all sorts of their own analysis. What do the top and bottom 10% of the population earn? Are there any high or low outsiders?

If the data is embedded in a database with other types of information, you can do even more fancy stuff. Which are the richest neighbourhoods in town? What level of education does the average person earning more than $100,000 possess? If you can link databases together, you can do even more. What kinds of crime are committed in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods? How about in the richest?

All this creates privacy risks, particularly given how data from different databases can be meshed together and used to identify individuals. There is also the risk of errors, if data from different sources is incorrectly integrated, or if the methodology of analysis is not sound. All the more reason why basic statistical literacy is an increasingly important piece of education to possess, for those trying to make sense of the world. Otherwise, you may fall victim to deeply faulty claims. The average income of a Happytown resident who owns a monocle may be $500,000, but that doesn’t mean that buying a monocle will make you rich.

Retiring the Shuttle

This year, after 29 years in operation and two catastrophes, the American Space Shuttle program is shutting down. The Shuttle was always a hacked-together prototype vehicle, never the cheap and dependable satellite-launching workhorse that NASA seemed to promise Congress. Lots of effort and brilliance went into the thing – make no mistake – but trips to space have never been safe or routine.

The Wikipedia entry on the Shuttle details just how costly the thing was, as a way of putting objects 300 or so kilometres above the Earth:

When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or whopping $60,000/kg to LEO [low Earth orbit]

There are things that are worth putting into orbit at those prices – chiefly communication satellites and others designed to observe our planet and the wider universe. Human beings probably aren’t worth it, for now at least. The process of getting out of the atmosphere is perilous and costly, and there is nowhere remotely habitable to go, once you get up there.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Recently, I found John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to be an entertaining distraction from less accessible books I am working on. A couple of days ago, driven by the desire to read something a bit zippier than my many books on environmental economics, I picked up Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. All told, I would say it is a somewhat better book than the one I read before. It includes a few interesting bits of tradecraft, and somewhat more commentary on the business of espionage itself. Le Carré has a talent for writing plausible observations on human character, and expressing them well. This is also clearly a fairly personal book for him.

It’s a decent choice for a summer read, especially if you are a politics and/or security nerd. As a tract on the amorality of the intelligence services, it is also a potentially useful counter to their moral glamorous portrayal in other fiction.

Bacillus safensis

Inside NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility, a species of bacteria was discovered which is highly resistant to gamma rays and ultraviolet radiation.

These microorganisms may now have been inadvertently transported to Mars, aboard the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. While it is probably unlikely that the bacteria will survive in that environment, it is possible that humanity has already seeded a planet other than the Earth with single-celled life.

What bears rights?

Arguably, the fundamental right of any entity that has rights is the right to have its interests taken into consideration. That is the rational basis for the Harm Principle (described recently). Entities with interests that we consider morally irrelevant do not have any other rights. For instance, we don’t feel the need to take the interests of a hammer or a clump of dirt seriously when making moral choices. At the same time, it is the right to consideration borne by some entities that forms the foundation upon which claims to any other rights (rights of free speech, to possess property, etc) are based. In order to treat an entity according to a higher-level moral principle such as fairness, it is necessary first to recognize that they bear the right to have their interests considered at all.

Humans as rights-bearers

Generally speaking, humanity grants the right to consideration to all humans. Exactly what that consideration requires can be hotly contested. For instance, someone who is unable to communicate but suffering terribly from a terminal illness might be granted consideration in radically different ways – some people would advocate doing everything possible to keep them alive, despite their suffering. Others might say that the way their interests can be best served is to let them die. Either way, the interests of the person themselves are part of the discussion.

It is also possible that there are objects that are human beings in a certain technical sense, but which do not deserve to have their interests taken into consideration. For instance, this category could include embryos at an early stage of development (or even perhaps at any stage), living bodies that have had their brains completely destroyed, or even frozen corpses at some future time when their re-animation is technically possible.

Non-humans as rights-bearers

We do not apply such a right of consideration to all living things. Rather, we treat many of them simply as means for serving the ends of entities that we do consider to be bearers of rights. In some cases, that is unobjectionable. Nobody can reasonably object to a person shaping a piece of stone into an axe head, without giving any consideration to the piece of stone. Similarly, we have no reason to think that people are unethical when they fail to take the interests of carrots or lettuce into consideration when deciding how to treat them.

When it comes to animals with rich mental lives, however, I think it is quite possible that human beings have inappropriately ignored the right they have to consideration. In slaughtering whales or putting gorillas into cruel circuses, we are behaving extremely callously toward animals that quite possibly have mental lives that possess a similar richness to our own. Arguably, we are also failing to recognize a legitimate right to consideration on the part of animals like pigs, when we pack them together into astonishingly cruel factory farms.

Being a rights-bearer just starts the moral discussion

To be a bearer of rights is to have a claim to consideration recognized by the entities around you that undertake moral reasoning. As such, the question of which entities rights are accorded to says more about the level of ethical conduct of the reasoners than of the subjects. We can choose to ignore what we know about the common characteristics of physical and mental life among animals, and thus treat pigs and gorillas and whales like we treat carrots or stones. In so doing, however, we might be revealing ourselves to be seriously lacking in moral character.

The science fiction author Orson Scott Card describes a moral hierarchy that distinguishes between ‘ramen’ with whom communication is possible and ‘varelse’ with whom it is impossible. While it can certainly be questioned whether communication potential is really the most important factor distinguishing between the ethical status of different beings, he does usefully recognize how the level of consideration accorded to a being may reflect the level of ethical sophistication of the being making the choice, rather than the subject of that choice:

The difference between ramen and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be ramen, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

That said, it does not follow that the most ethical course is to grant moral standing to everything in the universe, from dust mites to clouds of interstellar gas. For one thing, there are very often conflicts between the legitimate interests of rights-bearers. If we inappropriately accord a right to consideration to an entity that really doesn’t deserve it, we may force legitimate rights-bearers to needlessly sacrifice their own interests, in order to protect the meaningless or non-existent interests of that entity. That said, we should be cautious in saying that an entity has no rights whatsoever. Acknowledging that an entity is owed a duty of consideration is not the same thing as saying that it deserves any particular form of treatment, or that its interests should always be favoured.

Just as the ethical conclusions flowing from recognizing a human as rights-bearing can be hotly contested, so too are those for animals. It is possible that we can take the interests of animals seriously and still do things like kill them, experiment on them, eat their corpses, and even make them fight one another for our amusement. We take the interests of human beings seriously, but it is nonetheless potentially defensible in some circumstances to do all of these things: kill them, experiment on them, eat their corpses (say, when they have died naturally and as an alternative to death by starvation), and enjoy watching them fight. Whether the subject in question is human or not, recognition that they bear the right to some sort of consideration does not automatically mean that they must be treated in a particular way – it just starts the conversation about what the ethical way to behave toward them is. It establishes them as part of the moral universe, such as we understand it.

Diaspora – a less evil Facebook?

I am increasingly wary of Facebook. I don’t trust them with my photos, phone number, or full name. I worry about all the information they can extrapolate from my web of friends.

My hope is that Disapora will emerge as a less evil social network – one that supplies the considerable benefits of social networking, but with real respect for the privacy and interests of users.

Thanks to my friend Alison, I have an account on the alpha version of Diaspora. I have some invitations, so if anyone is especially keen to give it a try, they should let me know.