Science, Technology & Health: January 2004 Archives

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but civilization is officially over.

Everyone knows that the only reason men do anything is because they think it'll get them some attention from women (no one knows why women do anything). All of civilization is was built by men trying to get the best women to have sex with them. The advance of civilization was really just an incidental byproduct of the fact that sex generally involved eventually having kids, because for whatever reason the women threatened to quit having sex otherwise.

Get with the times, that's so 20th century!

For a while, liberated women seemed to be the up-and-coming social fashion -- they wanted to have sex, but you know, maybe the babies could wait a while. This was a new twist, but they still ended up having kids because that's just what happens. Thus, civilization endured for a while longer.

Now, women apparently don't even want to have sex, they just want our money. We always suspected this was the case, but in the past men bravely held out for sex before handing the money over. No more. Thanks to the internet -- and the total depravity of women -- I give you the imaginary girlfriend.

Some are hot, some are uh... otherwise, but who can really tell? That's the beauty of the internet! Both those listings could be for the same person (or company)! An entrepreneurial woman could have dozens of imaginary boyfriends.

And what does a man get for his $220.00?

This auction includes:

- Me sending you a one page letter, scented with my favorite perfume, once a week. YOU get to choose the details of the letter! ie: Sexy, Hot, Kinky, Sweet and Innocent, etc etc..

- I will also be sending you a sweet card on Valentine's Day! Also scented with perfume!

- If you buy me now for the Buy It now price you will get six, 1 hour webcam sessions on Yahoo, with light cyber and mild 'flashing' ;) This is for Buy It Now ONLY!

- Talking on AIM every other night. This will most likely be discussed since schedules may clash. Plus you will get photos emailed to you.

- You will receive 6 voicemail messages from me. ;) You just need to let me know when to call. NO LIVE PHONE CHATS. You also get to decide the details you want me to say in these messages!

- A real photo to hold and show off.

- You choice of 2 sexy thongs or bras scented with my perfume.<3

Terms and Conditions

- This in NO WAY makes me your real girlfriend.

- After the 60 days all communications are broken, no more chatting, e-mails, letters or phone calls..etc, etc. In other words no we can't be friends after this. Sorry. <3

- After 60 days, IF the buyer wants another 30, 60, days ie: letters, chatting etc. Price can be discussed over e-mail. Just let me know! ;)

- The winning bidder must tell the specifics of the relationship: ie: how we met, where, etc.

- The 60 days begins when I receive payment, I will email you after the auction has ended.

Actually, this sounds like some real girlfriends I've uh, known of. Anyway, the point is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. We all saw how liberation spread, and it's only a matter of time before women catch on to this new relationship paradigm.

Collect your things, because this crazy train called life is pulling into the last station.

(HT: BoingBoing.)

My brother sent me an article about this year's World Economic Forum, and here are some quotes from some attendees that interest me.

"I do not see much hope in the political domain, but a lot of hope in the technological domain," said [former Israeli Prime Minister] Shimon Peres....

This seems to be a common meme, but it's entirely baseless. Technology itself is a tool, and politics will always determine how that tool is wielded. No matter how advanced your hammer, if your building plans are flawed your house will turn our poorly. Likewise, technology alone does nothing to guarantee the future prosperity of mankind. Only those who worship technology as a religion can think otherwise.

Peres was one of many speakers who made the very Davosian point that in a world of six billion people, 80 percent of the economic activity is coming from a mere one billion, while another billion lives on less than $1 a day.

That's a meaningless statistic. There certainly are desperately poor people in the world, but $1 can buy a lot more in Zimbabwe than it can in America.

And there was energetic interest among many in Davos about using technology to improve the lot of the poor.

The thing holding poor nations down isn't a lack of technology, it's a lack of democratic institutions. As I said above, technology won't save people if they're still oppressed by politics. Actually, there is one technological advance that could be of assistance: guns. Give every person in the world an M16 and a thousand rounds and I bet things would change pretty quick.

Giving poor nations money and technology is like giving them fish, whereas giving them a democratic government is like teaching them to fish.

Another prediction: "Life expectancy will go to 150 in the next half-century."

I think that's conservative. We'll see.

There is some attention paid to the political aspect of technology, but unsurprisingly it takes the wrong tack.

Scary though it sounds, over time we will have a hard time keeping the most powerful weapons and tools out of the hands of anyone. We have to somehow create a world where that is not a threat. ...

Microsoft chief Bill Gates spoke privately to the press late Friday night, and he was full of notable thoughts that were generally as optimistic as those of Peres. ...

He also made a statement of the kind one doesn't hear often enough from global leaders: "If you ask what's the greatest divide in terms of rights and equities," he said, "it's national borders. That doesn't seem to bother people as much as I think it will."

The reason we need national borders seems blatantly obvious to me, but let me explain anyway. Despite Mr. Gate's praise for the "breakthtaking" economic situation in China ("it's capitalism at full speed"), that nation is still a Communist dictatorship, and its people are still horribly repressed. As long as the Communists want to maintain power (i.e., forever) they're never going to open their borders or allow truly free trade. Likewise, America can't afford to open its borders because the oppression in the rest of the world keeps most people poor and uneducated and unable to contribute to our modern society except as manual labor (and thugs). Until there's economic and political similarity -- even if not equality -- opening borders would be suicide.

What Gates and many at Davos realize is that it's not only charity to help the world's poor improve their lot. It's an issue of security. As Peres put it at breakfast, "Terror is the war of poor people, and suicide bombs are the weapons of poor people."

Absurd. Terror is the war of Islamic fascists. The September 11th hijackers all came from wealthy families. Most Palestinian bombers are poor, but then almost everyone in Palestine is poor because of Arafat and his cronies. Further, there are plenty of poor people in the world who don't go around committing terrorism. Basically, the only terrorists are Islamic fascists. (Some people will then point out the Irish Republican Army, but they seem to have quit, and they aren't poor; name another non-Islamofascist terrorist group.)

And then the World Economic Forum turned to more serious issues, like fighting spam.

Via Drudge I saw an article about Bill Clinton only sending two emails during his presidency, but the story misses the likely reason. Presidential emails sent from government computers (i.e., all the computers in the White House) would be public records and available for any interested party to read. Under those circumstances, I wouldn't write email either. I've also heard that President Bush's legal counsel advised him to stop using email when he became president.

It's possible that both presidents use(d) secret, personal computers to send private emails, but there's not really any way to know that for sure.

Broken Spirit

It's good to see that French scientists are hard at work on important problems.

Want to skim the perfect stone? A team of French researchers have worked out how, using their very own stone-skipping machine. ...

To achieve the maximum number of rebounds, the angle between a spinning stone and the water should be about 20 degrees1, advises Clanet: "This is the magic angle."

Incredible! That's not at all close to the angle people normally try to use to skip stones. Is angle all that matters?

Spin, speed and shape are also important. A stone is more likely to rebound if it is rotating, they found. This is because spin stabilises the object and prevents it from falling into the water.

Speedy stones are more likely to bounce than sluggish ones. A five-centimetre disc approaching the water at the magic angle needs to fly faster than 2.5 metres per second in order to avoid taking a plunge. Flat, round discs are ideal as their large surface area creates bounce on impact.

Amazing stuff.

I agree with Lileks. I want humanity to go to space. If the government wants to spend money on it, fine; if the government wants to get out of the way and leave it to "ordinary" Americans, even better. I don't care. I don't care how much it costs; I don't care what else doesn't get funded.

I don't want money wasted on stupid space stations that don't go anywhere but in circles (ellipses, shut up). Mars rovers are neat, but we should be scouting for landing sites. The Space Shuttle is a dangerous, pathetic joke that needs to be put down forthwith like a rabid, sickly dog. Quit wasting money taking it to the vet.

Sit back and imagine the type of space program we could have bought for the $400 billion President Bush instead spent on prescription drugs for old people, most of whom can already get the drugs through existing means. What's the International Stupid Station costing in total? $100 billion or so? Geesh. We could easily put a permanent base on the moon and then ship all the old people there for the cost of their prescription drugs.

How about this plan: cut all government funding for everything by 90%, cut taxes by half, and then split the remaining revenue evenly between the DoD and NASA. Oh sure, I know lots of people think NASA's a failure -- there's more work to be done than simply changing the funding around, but you get the idea.

By the way, here's Google's Mars Spirit image.

I bought an Airzooka this weekend, and it's super-fun. It's a strange device, and I'd never heard of it before I saw one sitting on the floor at Aahz. I couldn't figure out what it was at first, but once I fired it at my friends a few times I started to realize it's full potential.

As the description says, "This amazing invention launches a powerful vortex of air up to 20 feet. Powerful enough to blow out a candle from across the room!", and it's true. It's also powerful enough to piss people off from across a store. At $15 it's cheap, and my only regret is that it's so loud -- there's no way to blast someone without them figuring out where you are pretty quickly.

I'm trying to get a new cell phone -- discounted through AT&T Wireless, which owes me some favors -- and from the specs I really like the Sony Ericsson T616. Most of the reviews I've found are positive, but I haven't been able to find anything written by what I'd consider a reputable source. So, does anyone have any information or first-hand experience with this phone? Does anyone know of a good cell phone review site I may not have found easily through Google (none of which seemed very comprehensive)?

This is totally cool, and I haven't seen it anywhere else yet. My brother sent me a link to some a video of dancing robots built by Sony. The articulation and smoothness of motion is amazing! I'd seen pictures of the robots before, but now that I've seen them in action I'm a believer.

Update:
The Window Manager informs us that the robots in the video are called QRIO, and that they were shown off at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Update 2:
Here's a site with more pictures of what it calls the QURO, but appears to be the same as the QRIO. Passed on my an anonymous commenter in the wrong thread.

Africa has a lot of problems, but a new survey indicates that HIV may not be as widespread as previously thought. Here's the good news:

The study, carried out by the Kenyan government, suggests 6.7% of people have the disease.

Previous estimates had put the figure as high as 15% or 4.8m people.

Experts said the figures based on a sample of 8,561 households across the country are the most comprehensive to date.

The problem is that their survey methodology seems flawed.

This latest survey was carried out in September last year. As part of the survey, people were asked if they would be tested for HIV. Some 70% of those asked agreed.

The tests were carried out by officials from the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control. They found that 8.7% of women and 4.5% of men were HIV positive.

So the survey wasn't taken from a random sample. They may have asked a random sample to take HIV tests, but 30% of those asked refused. It seems very likely to me that a person's decision to agree or refuse to the test would be influenced by their own knowledge of their health and lifestyle. For instance, someone who never has sex or does drugs may refuse because they think there's no chance they have HIV and don't want to be bothered; someone who's very sick and suspects they may have HIV may refuse to take the test because they don't want to hear the bad news.

If either situation is very common then the results of this survey are meaningless -- and there's no way to know without testing the other 30% who refused. Therefore, although the numbers are encouraging, I'm skeptical that they really reflect the truth of the situation.

Some of my professors said my Ph.D. project was too complicated to work, but tonight I finally got a tribe of learning animats to seriously kick the crap out of three non-learning tribes at the same time. Yay for me!

Red's the learner, in case you didn't guess. The white dots are resource points (evenly distributed on this map); the dark-colored squares are territory controlled by each of the four tribes (black is uncontrolled); the light-colored dots are individual animats (you can see three red animats near the center of this snapshot). There are five animats from each tribe, but some of them may be overlapping.

Donald Sensing notes that satellite-radio provider Sirius is adding television service, and says he hopes internet service isn't far behind. Unfortunately, satellite internet service is a much more complicated beast than satellite radio or television.

Most of the difficulties stem from the fact that radio and TV are one-way communication: a dish has to be pointed in the right general direction, and it catches relatively high-powered signals broadcast by a satellite from geosynchronous orbit. But for internet access you need a two-way connection, and although you typically require less bandwidth upstream than downstream you still need to send some data up -- to tell what emails and webpages to fetch, for instance.

There are satellite internet providers, and it's not that difficult to send data back up to a satellite. One such provider is StarBand, and as you can see from their price chart the initial equipment cost is pretty substantial but the monthly fees aren't too bad. The real problem with satellite internet on a mobile platform (such as a car or boat, where satellite radio is popular) is that although it's easy to receive broadcast signals from a satellite (XM Radio uses the roof of the car as a dish, for instance) it's very difficult to keep a mobile broadcast antenna pointed at the correct satellite transponder to allow for upstream communication. A satellite in geosynchronous orbit is 22,000 miles away and transponders are pretty small; it's basically impossible to keep a dish pointed properly while in motion. If your car rotates one degree your upstream signal would move more than 450 miles off target. That's why (most) satellite phones you've seen pictures of have ground-mounted base stations.

There are some alternatives, such as using a wireless phone modem for upstream communication and the satellite for download; but if you've got cell coverage then it would certainly be cheaper to use your wireless phone for upstream and downstream communication rather than bother with using a satellite at all.

If you really want satellite-based internet, there's always Iridium, a satellite phone system that uses a constellation of of 66 low-earth orbit satellites that don't need to be precisely targeted (because there's so many, and they're 1% as far away as geosynch satellites). They also offer satellite data/internet service -- at the pitiful rate of 2.4Kbps to 10Kbps (compared to 56.6Kbps modems that no one even uses anymore). In 1994, an Iridium satellite phone cost $30,000, but that fell to $1,500 by 2002. The Navy gets call time for around $1 per minute, but I expect civilians can't get that good a price, and in 1997 the cost was $6-$7 per minute. At 10Kbps it would take 3.5 minutes to load my front page, so multiply that by a few bucks per minute....

Costs will probably come down in the future, but there's a limit, largely due to the fact that we're simply running out of frequencies to transmit on. There are only so many frequencies suitable for data transmission, and they're all in use. DirecTV is having problems finding more room for their TV channels already. There's no way for satellites to carry all the internet traffic that's currently used by the internet, at any price.

(And now the caveat: I'm not an expert on this, and I'll welcome more detailed information from anyone who wants to offer it.)

Phil speculates on the future of wealth, and says that with sufficiently advanced technology (like nano-assemblers and perfect virtual reality) the concept of wealth will cease to exist.

Two (hypothetical) future developments promise to flatten the delta virtually out of existence. One of these is the universal assembler (third item), which uses nanotechnology to allow anybody to make — literally — anything they want, including their own univeral assembler. In addition to closing the gap between the rich and the average, this device will eliminate any remaining gap between the average and the poor. Poverty won't exist any more.

The other development is full-immersion virtual reality, which will enable anyone to experience anything. Think of that scene in the first Matrix where they arm themselves by selecting weapons from an inexhaustable warehouse containing every firearm ever conceived. Now map that capability over to things like cars and vacations and (yes) romantic partners.

Who's richer, a guy with one real Porsche or a guy with a virtual collection of every Porsche model ever built? Assuming the VR is flawless and the experience of driving the virtual cars is identical to the real thing, I'm going to say the second guy. If this capability is ever realized, the day people generally agree with my answer is the day the concept of "wealth" ceases to exist.

He and Glenn Reynolds also say that (democratic!) political influence is getting harder to buy, considering that Americans watch less TV and are influenced and enthused more by websites than by political ads. That's all true... but there will always be the power of physical force, and there will always be people with more physical power than others. Even if nano-assemblers give us all armies of wicked wizard robots, someone's assembler is going to be faster than yours -- or sitting on a more powerful black-hole-engine -- and they're going to be able to kill you and smash your virtual Porsches. And then there will always be the people who are more convincing than you are, and able to gather armies and followers and whatnot.

Even aside from raw physical power, forms of wealth may change but the concepts of wealth and possession are built into human nature and won't ever disappear. Look at the kinds of distinctions we make between objects of varying levels of wealth right now: my hypothetical house is more expensive than yours because I have copper plumbing and live in a school district with 5% higher test scores! To a person 100 years ago, those value differences would be meaningless relative to the vast wealth differential between his time and ours. The man from the past would see both you and I as fantastically rich -- and that's how Phil is looking towards the future -- whereas we may see clear and important differences between our hypothetical houses. In the future, wealth distinctions will probably become more subtle (my Space Bugatti has seventeen cupholders and was assembled from the core of a neutron star, you plebian!), but they're never going to go away.

Mars in Color!

So the sperm count of men in the UK dropped by 29% between 1989 and 2002... according to a survey of men attending a certain fertility clinic in northern Scotland. The researchers speculate that lifestyle factors such as obesity and alcohol may be to blame, but there's at least one critical piece of information missing from the report: has the average age of men using the facility changed? In America, at least, the average age that people are having their first child has been rising, and I imagine that if there's a similar phenomenon in the UK it would affect this survey of fertility clinic patients.

Rand Simberg, of Transterrestrial Musings, has an excellent piece up on the Fox News site about the future of space flight. He uses a blog-post-like format and includes a ton of links, thereby increasing the information content far beyond that of normal news stories. As I've mentioned in the past, I really like that Fox News allows its writers to use external links, and I've even seen some in the site's normal (news) content.