Science, Technology & Health: April 2005 Archives

Here's a environmental philosophy I can support whole-heartedly: "environmental economics.

“THE environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest.” Those damning words come not from any industry lobby or right-wing think-tank. They are drawn from “The Death of Environmentalism”, an influential essay published recently by two greens with impeccable credentials. They claim that environmental groups are politically adrift and dreadfully out of touch. ...

If environmental groups continue to reject pragmatic solutions and instead drift toward Utopian (or dystopian) visions of the future, they will lose the battle of ideas. And that would be a pity, for the world would benefit from having a thoughtful green movement. It would also be ironic, because far-reaching advances are already under way in the management of the world's natural resources—changes that add up to a different kind of green revolution. This could yet save the greens (as well as doing the planet a world of good).

Read the rest of the article for a very brief synopsis of how market forces can be utilized to protect our valuable environment. It points out that stereotypical environmentalists generally roll their eyes at the application of economic principles such as cost-benefit analysis to the environment, but until they're willing to abandon emotional scare tactics for reason and logic it's unlikely that they're going to achieve any of their goals -- goals that I largely share, and would join them in if their methods weren't so hideously counter-productive.

James Taranto makes a great point about aborted abortions:

Abortive Abortions "The Bush administration said Friday that it would enforce a nearly 3-year-old federal law that requires doctors to attempt to keep alive a fetus that survives an abortion," reports the Associated Press in a dispatch bearing the weird title "White House to Enforce Abortion-Fetus Law." The New York Times has an even more bizarre statement:

In a telephone conference call announcing the new enforcement policy, [Dennis] Smith [director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations] could not provide a rule of thumb to distinguish a fetus from a "born-alive infant."

This is confusing only to those who insist on denying that a fetus is what it is, namely an unborn child. Once a child is born, he ceases being a fetus and is simply a child.

It seems to me that a baby who survives an abortion and ends up outside the womb should clearly be considered a "real" human being, even by those who favor abortion. It's interesting how often this must happen. Considering that there are around 1,000,000 abortions in the United States each year, even low abortion complication rates will lead to tens of thousands of incidents -- and I immediately question the veracity of any complication statistics collected by doctors who perform abortions; they've got a financial motivation to undercount.

Frequency:

* In the US: Frequency depends on gestational age (GA) at time of abortion and method of abortion. Complication rates according to GA at time of abortion are as follows: (1) fewer than 6 weeks, less than 1%; (2) 12-13 weeks, 3-6%; and (3) second trimester, up to 50%, possibly higher.

Not all complications result in the baby surviving his or her execution, but that's one of the potential complications listed. One percent of one million is ten thousand, which is an awful lot.

Update 050428:
Here's an article about a Florida woman whose son was unsuccessfully aborted.

A conservative legal group has filed two complaints against a Florida abortion clinic claiming the clinic refused to help a mother whose baby was born alive, despite a law that protects babies "accidentally" born during abortion procedures from being killed or left to die.

The mother, Angele, had gone to the EPOC clinic in Orlando, Fla., to get an abortion. After the first day of the procedure, she was required to return to the clinic the following day for an induced abortion. When her baby was born alive, the woman screamed for help, but the clinic workers refused to help her, according to the Liberty Counsel.

Reprehensible.

For anyone out there who cares, I was getting an error loading Visual Studio 6 project files (.dsp) using Visual Studio .NET 2003. The error said "Cannot load the project due to a corrupt project file" but gave no indication as to how to fix the problem, and there wasn't any solution online that I could quickly find. The answer turned out to be that the .dsp files needed to be converted to DOS file format rather than Unix. I'm not sure why VS6 would create the .dsp files in Unix format, or if the FTP server converted them, but once I opened the files and converted them to DOS using emacs "C-x ENT f dos" and re-saved them, .NET 2003 opened them just fine. (DOS text files have carriage returns and line feed characters at the end of every line, whereas Unix text files only have line feeds.)

For the past couple of weeks I've been learning to use C# using .NET in Windows and Mono in SuSe Linux, and I have to say that I find the language rather annoying. I've never been a big fan of Java, and C# is certainly nicer to use than Java because the library calls aren't all 1000 characters long, but I find all the contrivances required to obfuscate pointers to be incredibly cumbersome.

Keywords like ref and out appear to be largely redundant, for example. Properties like get and set are cool (and remind me of Visual Basic), but if I build a class with a regular member variable and then later decide to change it to a property, I have to recompile everything that interfaces with that class; it'd sure be nice if that were transparent. Furthermore, what's with switch statement case labels not automatically falling through? Stupid. Plus, main() has to belong to an object, but then its cluged to work similarly to in C/C++!

Overall, C# has a lot of unintuitive features that translate messily from C/C++ and generally don't make life easier. I can see why they may make garbage collection and array bounds checking easier, but I don't care how hard those are to implement! I'd rather have a clean, elegant programming language that didn't feel so ad hoc.

Slashdot has a link up to a randomly generated computer science research paper that's been accepted into a conference. Yes, this verifies that we really have no idea what we're doing most of the time. Still, this isn't as amusing to me as my Random Conspiracy Generator, despite the fact that the RCG needs to be updated for the 21st century. (HT: Cypren.)

ZMP Inc. is selling a humanoid home security and entertainment robot in Tokyo for the reasonable price of US$5,450.

The 15-inch tall, 5.5 pound robot called nuvo from ZMP Inc. also comes in a fancier $8,200 version with the same functions and a design inspired by lacquer-ware painted on its body.

The robot can walk, get up and respond to voice commands such as "turn right." It links to mobile phones so that people can check on images of their homes taken on a digital camera inside the robot's head. It can be controlled by a remote and is programmed to do a dance. It also makes musical sounds.

Doesn't sound like much of a security robot, but it's got most of the difficult subsystems already in place: you can control it remotely, and see through the camera. It's only a matter of time before someone usurps an arm actuator and welds on a .22.

(HT: Reader John, and Drudge apparently.)

This isn't news, but it's interesting in light of my earlier post on youth and STDs that "Churchgoing improves life expectancy".

The research looked at 4,000 old people from North Carolina, and found that of the 1,177 who died during a six-year period, 22.9% were frequent church attenders, compared with 37.4 who were infrequent attenders.

Similar results were produced by the University of California at Berkeley in a study of some 5,000 people aged 21 to 65.

Those who attended religious services at least once a week had a 23% lower risk of dying over the 28 years on which the research was based.

Not only that, but the lives of church-goers may also be of higher quality.

In addition, lower levels of depression are known to have a wider health benefit.

In addition, religion provides a coping mechanism for stressful events or physical illness.

Devout worshippers are far less likely to fall back on harmful habits such as drinking or smoking.

Dr Koenig said: "Such positive feelings may counteract stress and convey health effects, like enhanced immune function, that go far beyond the prevention of depression and other negative emotions."

Yes, it says "in addition" twice... my advisor would never let me write something that sloppy. Anyway, as I've said before, Christianity appears to be a very advantageous meme. Plus, you'll get more Social Security money.

Few biological forces are more powerful than sexual selection pressure, which is often used to explain everything from peacock feathers to human mid-life crises. What will be particularly interesting to see will be the second-generation effects of the boomers' sexual "liberation" as STDs run rampant through their kids, many of which can lead to sterility, either through biological damage or simple unattractiveness. So now we have the Roe effect putting pressure on leftist morality, and STDs effectively wiping out a generation of lascivious youth. Even if they don't die from their diseases, if they can't or won't reproduce then they're effectively dead biologically... except we're talking about memes here, so even the "dead" can spread their fatal philosophies on to others for a while.

The biggest cultural advantage of Christian morality -- aside from being spiritually right -- is that it gives its hosts tremendous reproductive strength and children that are likely to pass on the meme. Competing leftist ideals lead to death.

I've written a lot about my skepticism about evolution, and here's a post on The Loom about mutations in the HIV virus that will serve as an illustration of of one of the assumptions that evolutionists make without, in my opinion, much merit: that genetic similarity implies common ancestry. Carl Zimmer -- who undoubtedly knows more about biological evolution than I do, since I'm a computer scientist who only simulates evolution -- displays and explains several charts that show how various strands of HIV are related to each other and to SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus).

I have no doubt that human DNA is similar to chimp DNA, and that what Mr. Zimmer calls "microevolution" (a term originally created by skeptics of evolution?) occurs. In small time scales, changes can be traced between SIV and HIV, and their relationship can be observed and tested. However, the "wall" that Mr. Zimmer refers to is that of time, and it's a fact that any common ancestry between chimps and humans can only be inferred, not proven or even reproduced in a scientific manner (without a time machine). There's a gaping chasm between demonstrating genetic similarity and proving common ancestry that science cannot hope to bridge. The only difference between those who believe that God created life and those who believe it evolved is that the latter tend to fill in the holes with deception rather than faith.

Random mutation and natural selection are real and can be observed, but there's very little evidence to suggest that they are capable of explaining the origin of life. Predictions based on evolution are often very wrong. Just like everyone else, scientists have agendas and research tends to follow the grant money. (All that means is that you have to abandon the illusion of scientific objectivity and be prepared to consider the motivations and prejudices behind everything that's published (including this site, of course).)

Finally, I'll add a note from my own research and simulations. In my experience, similarity seems to be the rule for evolutionary systems. I've run countless simulations with non-interbreeding species with randomly generated genomes in NS+M environments (natural selection plus mutation), and their genomes almost always converge. Why? Because evolution is an optimization algorithm, and if it's implemented properly it will find an optimal solution to whatever evaluation criteria is applied to it. There are often local maximums that can trap poor implementations (perhaps analogous to "niches" in a biosphere), but over time these get shaken out and the result is uniformity, not diversity.

Update:
Phelps comments and posts and link to an fascinating story about plants that defy normal laws of heredity.

Challenging a scientific law of inheritance that has stood for 150 years, scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when their predecessors carried genetic flaws. ...

In the Purdue experiment, researchers found that a watercress plant sometimes corrects the genetic code it inherited from its flawed parents and grows normally like its grandparents and other ancestors.

There's a lot we don't understand yet, and much of what we think we understand is probably wrong.