Category: Geek stuff

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

Test for a sentient species: can you run a planet?

In the very long term, the survival of the human species depends upon developing the capability to colonize other planets. Earth is always vulnerable to major asteroid and meteor impacts, and there will come points billions of years in the future when the carbon cycle ends and when the sun becomes a red giant.

As of today, however, humanity has more pressing problems. Indeed, it is not at all clear that humanity will be able to survive the next few centuries. We continue to abuse the planet – exhausting non-renewable resources and accumulating dangerous wastes. At the same time, the world is still wired up for a Dr. Strangelove-style nuclear war, with thousands of cities incinerated with thermonuclear bombs, followed by nuclear winter.

In a way, perhaps overcoming those challenges and any others that arise in the next few centuries will be an important test for humanity. If we were to spread through the galaxy now, we would arguably be spreading as a malignancy: a species that cannot manage itself, and which brings the risk of ruin to any place it visits. If we can spend the next few centuries producing a global society that is safe and sustainable, perhaps we will have gained the maturity to carry something valuable outwards – something that better represents the potential of humanity, when compared with the messes we have produced for ourselves at this stage in history.

Mega-libertarianism

For me, John Stewart Mill’s Harm Principle is a key element of libertarian philosophy. It holds that a person should be free to do as they like, until they start causing harm to others. If you want to have an avante garde theatre on your land, that is your right and I cannot object unless the noise is keeping me aware at 3:00am or you start dumping toxic paint into the river from which I drink.

At an election party the other night, however, I spoke with someone who has a more expansive libertarian philosophy than I had previously encountered – one that isn’t especially bothered by harm. They thought the important thing was for individuals to be as unrestricted as possible by government, even if their behaviour is causing harm to others. If you really value liberty for its own sake, perhaps it makes sense to adopt a Wild West ethical philosophy, in which individuals are behaving rightly whenever they try to get what they want. That said, I think this philosophy proves lacking very quickly as soon as some questions are asked.

Basically, the underlying ethic is that the strong should feel free to impose themselves on the weak. When you discard the Harm Principle, you leave people to fend for themselves. If my neighbour has guns and goons and I do not, I have no way to personally prevent him from dumping plutonium into my river, stealing my property, or having me beaten up for expressing my political views. In order to live in a decent society, I think we need to constrain the rights of the powerful. Everyone must be subject to the rule of law, and the law must protect important rights such as the freedom of speech.

A mega-libertarian society which discards the Harm Principle seems to me much like the Hobbesian state of nature. It wouldn’t necessary be quite as chaotic and violent as Hobbes believed, but it would certainly be terribly unjust. Without the Harm Principle, there is no moral basis to condemn rape, robbery, or murder. Under mega-libertarianism, a serial killer is just expressing themselves in their preferred manner, and the government really ought to get off their back.

I can appreciate the libertarian impulse to be skeptical about government and other systems of societal organization. At the same time, we must recognize that the whims of the over-mighty are also a major constraint upon liberty. It is much better to live in a democratic society with the rule of law than to live in a feudal society where military strength determines who is in charge and what the rules will be. In order for a society to be truly free, those who live within it need to adopt reasonable limits on their own behaviour.

Use a wiki to make a family tree

Yesterday it occurred to me that a wiki would be an ideal way to assemble a family tree.

People could be added in, with open fields where information about them can be added. There could be basic things – like dates of birth, marriage, and death – and more personal ones, like schools attended and so on.

By making it a wiki, the project wouldn’t put a huge burden on a single person, and everyone could easily contribute what they knew.

Custom software specifically intended for making family tree wikis would probably be better than using generic wiki software like MediaWiki. It could be tweaked to suit the purpose more intuitively and be easier to use.

Giving last names to children

When sperm and eggs – collectively called gametes – are formed, a process called meiosis takes place. This is the process where a human’s complete set of 23 pairs of chromosomes gets reduced into a single set of 23. That way, two gametes can combine to form a complete genome, comprised half from the father’s genetic material and half from the mother’s.

Perhaps this process can serve as a model for a more rational way to deal with family names. It is clearly antiquated to stick to the approach of having a woman’s family name obliterated at marriage. Women aren’t commodities traded between clan-like, male-dominated families. As such, I see no rational basis for them taking their husband’s name.

There is an exchange in an episode of The Simpsons that touches on all of this:

Marge: The police have such a strong case against Homer! Mr. Burns said he did it, they found his DNA on Mr. Burns’ suit.

Lisa: They have Simpson DNA; it could have come from any of us! Well, except you, since you’re a Bouvier.

Marge: No! No, no. When I took your father’s name I took everything that came with it, including DNA!

Lisa: Um…(rolls her eyes) Okay, Mom.

Of course, having parents with two different family names after marriage complicates the question of what name to give to any children. I propose an approach modelled on meiosis.

For the first generation, it is easy. The children of Mr. A B and Mrs. X Y would have the family name B-Y (or Y-B, whatever).

Once generations of people with hybrid names start to marry, however, there is the clear risk of infinite last-name expansion. If a B-Y marries an M-N, should any resulting children be called B-Y-M-N? What about when those B-Y-M-N children start marrying C-Z-O-P children?

This is where the meiosis comes in. When naming a child, each parent would choose how to cut down their own last name to one that is a reasonable length to serve as half of a hyphenated name. For example, someone with the unfortunate surname of ‘Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg’ should probably pick one of four. Someone with a more reasonable surname, such as ‘Bowes-Lyon’, should pick one of two. Someone with a surname as concise as ‘Kent’ or ‘Chan’ could keep the whole thing.

I would leave it up to the individual to choose how to do the truncating. They can choose the parts of their ancestry that have more personal importance for them, or they can do it at random.

Through this approach, children would have names that more accurately reflect the reality of their lineage, without ending up with names that are impractically long.

Smartphones and location data

There have been some worrisome revelations recently about Apple and Google tracking people by the location of their cell phones. In Google’s case, the tracking may be part of an advertising strategy.

It seems like online privacy is really a losing battle these days. Perhaps consumer anger about these latest tracking allegations will encourage regulators to keep a closer eye on what sort of monitoring technologies are being deployed without the full understanding of consumers.

Photojournalistic style

These are some of the nicest things about having a quasi-journalistic photographic style:

  1. Most of your gear is light enough to carry around
  2. You don’t need to spend endless hours in Photoshop applying otherworldly effects
  3. The gear is versatile, and useful for almost every kind of photography
  4. It could help to secure permission for projects like my hospital idea

It would be awfully restrictive to only be able to work in a studio, and it would be tiresome to spend an eternity with a mouse in hand, coaxing exotic images from RAW files.

Education as a technology

“Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child’s nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much more difficult than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because these bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. p. 222 (paperback)

Where paywalls might work

Making internet browsers pay for content is a big challenge. No matter how good your stuff is, chances are someone is giving away something similarly good for free. As such, most websites opt to fund themselves through advertising.

One place paywalls do seem to have promise is for sites that people access for work-related reasons. Then, the situation is akin to the subscriptions universities have to databases of journal articles. Their staff need them, and so the organization pays the subscription fee. That’s a model that news organizations might be able to use, given that the work of many different people is affected by the information they provide.

STRATFOR is one organization experimenting with different funding models for information online. They probably have some institutional subscribers, but they also advertise directly to interested individuals, sometimes offering significant discounts to lure those whose demand is more elastic.

Options for the civically minded

For people who feel a sense of civic duty – a determination to do what they can to improve the laws and policies of their society – it seems to me that there are multiple valid avenues through which to apply your efforts.

The most overt may be entering politics, but it is an option that carries many costs. You might have to spend a lot of time at small-town barbecues wearing a silly apron, to try to convince voters that you’re an ordinary guy like them and not some fancy-school elitist. You might also have to lie about or conceal beliefs that go beyond what the mainstream is willing to accept (better not be an atheist, for instance). Still, if you do take the political route and find yourself in a position of influence, at least you have a pretty defensible mandate to try to implement the ideas you campaigned on.

The civil service is another option. The influence and the constraints of the civil service are both tied to the same role: providing advice. Being someone who provides advice gives you the freedom to use your judgment and the best available evidence to suggest a course of action. The trouble is, you can always be over-ruled by your superiors or by the people who ultimately make the decisions. Civil servants therefore have a moderate level of freedom for expressing their honestly-held and well-justified views, but little certainty that their advice will ever make a difference.

Journalists and academics have the most freedom to speak and defend their arguments in public, but they have even less certainty that their efforts will ever produce concrete changes. Judges, by contrast, know their judgments will have concrete effects, but they don’t know whether that influence will be confined entirely to the case at hand, or whether it will become a more influential precedent.

Setting aside the advantages and disadvantages of different roles, I think it is important to acknowledge that people in all of these roles can be doing their civic duty, in the sense of trying to serve the best interests of their country and the world more broadly. It is possible to serve those interests through obedience – for instance, those who put themselves in physical danger for the good of others – but it is also possible to serve them through honest and open criticism. All governments have made serious mistakes in the past and face major challenges today. If we are to navigate successfully to a safe and comfortable future, there needs to be energetic and open debate based on the best evidence available.