Science, Technology & Health: August 2004 Archives
Tim Wu, guest-blogging at Lessig Blog, wonders if "certain members of the federal judiciary [are] actually highly intelligent robots?". I think the answer is clearly no. Even presuming the existence of "strong" artificial intelligence (which I do not believe in), building such an AI into robotic form would serve little purpose. To the best of my knowledge, federal judges don't do anything other than write long boring papers, so there's no real need for them to have bodies at all. If some federal judges are artificial intelligences rather than humans, they're probably contained in traditional computer-shaped forms, rather than in complicated robots.
Men's Health mentions a research study claiming that counting calories is a waste of time.
Researchers in the USA have discovered that counting calories can be a waste of time, because foods with the same calorific value can be absorbed at different rates.That's likely to be true, but the experiment was under very controlled conditions with very limited sets of food (shakes, almonds, and pasta). I really like the format of the website, because on the same page as the article Dr. Toni Steer, from the magazine, comments in a distinct space:
While this is interesting research from the City of Hope Medical Center, the bottom line is that the total number of calories eaten do count. ...That tends to be my perspective as well. I count calories every day -- taken in and burned through exercise -- and in my experience it's the most effective way to gather information on your metabolism.You need to look at the big picture. If you are eating 500 calories more than you need each day it doesn't matter how much spicy food, coffee, meat and almonds you eat, you'll see the pounds pile on.
Also in my experience, most people who count calories lie. I know fat people who claim to eat very little -- it's not my fault I'm fat! -- but when I watch them it's clear that they're not really adding the numbers up right. I know it's easy to forget to count a cookie here or there, or an extra helping of potatoes, but those forgotten bites are exactly what's preventing them from losing weight.
Two interesting stories that bump up against each other: radical life extension and mothers who expect lengthy lives tend to produce sons. I've talked about the first many times, including some speculation on how society would change if we lived drastically longer lives. The second says:
Mothers who think they have longer to live are more likely to give birth to boys than girls, a survey of British women shows. The finding backs up the long-held theory that women may unwittingly be able to influence the sex of their unborn child.Oddly, it may also be that having a baby boy causes mothers to think they'll live longer than mothers who have girls. Still, it's an interesting correlation. If everyone starts living much longer, will girls become more rare? I certainly hope not!Sarah Johns from the University of Kent asked 609 first-time mothers, who had already given birth, to guess when they thought they would die. By subtracting the mother's age, she then calculated the number of years each woman thought she had left to live. The results are reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society1.
As the number of perceived years left rose, so too did the chance that they had had a son. Every extra year on the clock increased the odds of producing a male by 1%.
Of course, once we have radical life extension we'll probably also be able to select the genders of our children... would that be acceptable if the ratio of men to women got dramatically skewed? As I've noted before, countries and cultures with more men than women tend to be seriously screwed up.
I don't doubt all the scientific studies that show the benefits of breastfeeding... but I don't want to watch.
More than two dozen mothers staged a breastfeeding "nurse-in" at a Starbucks Corp. store in Maryland over the weekend in an effort to get the world's largest coffee shop chain to adopt a policy allowing breastfeeding in all its U.S. stores.Is that really so unreasonable? Furthermore, is it healthy to be chugging espresso while nursing? Look, I know it's natural and all -- yippie -- but am I the only one who's a little uncomfortable when some woman whips it out and stuffs it in her baby's mouth? Or am I being unreasonable?Lorig Charkoudian, who organized the event, said on Tuesday that she began her quest a month ago when she was nursing her 15-month-old daughter at the store in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was asked by a Starbucks employee to cover up with a blanket or breastfeed in the bathroom.
For my own reference, here's Aubrey de Grey's site on Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.
SENS is a detailed plan for curing human aging. SENS is an engineering project, in the same way that medicine is a branch of engineering. The key to SENS is the appreciation that aging is best viewed as a set of progressive changes in body composition at the molecular and cellular level, caused as side-effects of essential metabolic processes. These changes are therefore best thought of as an accumulation of "damage", which becomes pathogenic above a certain threshold of abundance.
I suppose this is more art than science, but it's art that looks like science, so... take a look at Brotron Labs and check out Greg Brotherton's atomic weapons, combat robots, and scientific apparatus. Very cool. I hear he's built laser cannons out of vacuum cleaners as well.
It's interesting that so much study as been done on detecting deception, but there is little serious scholarship on how to get away with a lie. Maybe they're two sides of the same coin, or maybe it's that we're so good at lying that there isn't much room for improvement.
People don't seem to be very good at spotting deception signals. On average, over hundreds of laboratory studies, participants distinguish correctly between truths and lies only about 55 percent of the time. This success rate holds for groups as diverse as students and police officers. "Human accuracy is really just barely better than chance," says DePaulo.Deception is a really fascinating arms race, especially considering that it's the main flaw with just about every game-theory-based explanation for cooperation. It's always slightly more expensive to catch liars than it is to lie.
(HT: GeekPress.)
