A reader disagrees about the requirement of self-awareness:
I’m less worried about AI / sentient / self-aware robots, than just autonomous killing machines of any kind. Real AI is a real concern, but a lot further off. A machine that can operate without human control and decide to kill or not to kill a target is a lot closer — think autonomous “drone”. Once those get cheap enough, we’re in real trouble.
Could be. I hope we don’t have an actual resolution to this dispute, in all honesty.
While the American legislature attempts to stop the Iran nuclear deal, it’s worthwhile to see how the deal, if not stopped, affects the Mideast region. Ali Mamouri at AL Monitor gives a summary :
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir traveled to the United States on July 17 to meet with US President Barack Obama to express Saudi Arabia’s concerns. Moreover, Saudi newspapers, such as al-Watan, al-Madina and al-Sharq al-Awsat, said the deal poses a great challenge to Saudi Arabia, which prompted members of the Saudi Consultative Assembly to call for development of “a nuclear program similar to that of Iran.” …
According to statements by Saudi officials, the nuclear deal will enable Iran to further support Saudi Arabia’s regional opponents in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, and will strengthen the Iranian regime. Therefore, they said, the existing conflict in the region will extend and grow deeper, leading to additional wars and fighting.
Clearly Iran’s largest rival, Saudi Arabia, has little trust of Iran. Iran’s view of the situation?
Following up on Iran’s regional policy, there appear to be different visions within the country. The first is that of the reformist current, led by Expediency Council Chairman Hashemi Rafsanjani, who believes there is a need for coordination and dialogue with Saudi Arabia to resolve regional crises. Rafsanjani has repeatedly called for improved communication with Saudi Arabia, and he supports a regional agreement between the countries.
The second vision is that of the radical current, which believes Iran has succeeded in its regional policy against the Saudi axis, and that there is no need for coordination with Saudi Arabia in any regional issue in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain. This vision stems from the feeling that “Iran is not an important country in the region, but rather the only important country in the region,” an Iranian official who refused to reveal his name told former United Nations special envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi in 2013.
Charmingly aggressive. Recall that Iran is Shi’ite, while Saudi Arabia is lead by Wahhabis, which is a strict form of Sunni Islam, so mutual distaste appears to be inevitable. Mamouri concludes:
Accordingly, there is an urgent need to find a balance of power and understanding between the regional players, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia. This should be the US administration’s second objective after the nuclear deal. It can now act as a mediator between Iran and Saudi Arabia to converge the views and produce a durable and stable balance in the region.
While the deal appears to be a good deal for the Western powers in that it reduces Iranian potential for achieving nuclear weapons, while permitting progress towards nuclear power, a key Iranian goal, clearly the Saudis worry that the Iranians may subvert the deal regardless, so that leaves a question for the current American Administration: How to reassure the Saudis of the impossibility for the Iranians to achieve the weapons? And they clearly state that the easing of sanctions may increase the conventional fighting in the region.
And by tying sanctions to the nuclear deal, the United States does hamstring itself in one way – reimposing sanctions for non-nuclear infringements may cause the Iranians to call off the deal, using Western hypocrisy as an excuse.
And what about other Mideast nations? Al Jazeera report Bahrain is unhappy:
Bahrain has announced the recalling of its ambassador to Tehran for consultations after what it said were repeated hostile Iranian statements. …
Sunni-ruled Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, often accuses Shia Iran of seeking to subvert Bahrain.
Iran denies interfering in Bahrain, although it acknowledges it does support opposition groups seeking greater political and economic rights for Bahrain’s Shia community.
Bahraini state media reported on Saturday that the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (SCIA) “strongly denounced the repeated blatant Iranian interference in Bahrain’s internal affairs in order to shake up the kingdom’s stability and fan tension”.
All this post-deal.
A reader writes about conservation efforts in California:
There’s plenty of room for improved energy efficiency and material conservation (water, wood, energy, etc.) in the average American household without any loss of opportunity, happiness or convenience. It’s just habits and manner of thinking. Remember back when nobody recycled anything (except maybe poor college students collecting aluminum cans to make some spending change)? Profligate wastefulness never makes sense and never looks good, on anyone.
And while I may agree, it’s not a universally held opinion. In societies less well-off than ours, it can be a signal of power to waste materials in some grand gesture: for example, the potlatch:
Dorothy Johansen describes the dynamic: “In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his ‘power’ to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his ‘power’ was diminished.”[11] Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, were observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods. (Wikipedia)
Obviously, the potlatch was about more than just destroying material goods – and it varied from culture to culture. Wise? My impulse is to say no, but on consideration, if your goal, and a key to your survival, is to have more prestige than your neighbor, and this was a channel for achieving that goal, then I have to say it’s wise.
The problem of killer robots is taking on a new urgency, as evidenced by an open letter penned by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and many other. Published at The Future of Life Institute, here’s the heart of it:
The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc.
Sounds a lot like my previous post on the subject – everything’s coming together, especially the AI momentum. James Cook at Business Insider seems unimpressed:
Elon Musk has been ranting about killer robots again.
Musk posted a comment on the futurology site Edge.org, warning readers that developments in AI could bring about robots that may autonomously decide that it is sensible to start killing humans.
His colleague, Dylan Love, found it hard to find roboticists willing to talk, but managed a couple of interviews:
… as I heard from the few roboticists who spoke to me on the record, there are real risks involved going forward, and the time to have a serious discussion about the development and regulation of robots is now.
Author and physicist Louis Del Monte told us that the robot uprising “won’t be the ‘Terminator’ scenario, not a war. In the early part of the post-singularity world — after robots become smarter than humans — one scenario is that the machines will seek to turn humans into cyborgs. This is nearly happening now, replacing faulty limbs with artificial parts. We’ll see the machines as a useful tool.”
The Singularity is a futurist term for the inflection point in the speed at which science and technology is developed where it becomes infinite, i.e., if you were to graph the pace of development against time, the line would go vertical, indicating it’s taking nearly no time to develop anything. This would imply, among other things, an artificial intelligence superior to mankind’s intelligence.
But according to Del Monte, the real danger occurs when self-aware machines realize they share the planet with humans. They “might view us the same way we view harmful insects” because humans are a species that “is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses.”
At the end of the article, Love asks his subjects for SF recommendations illustrating the risks:
Ryan Calo: “I would recommend ‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M. Forster for an eerie if exaggerated account of where technology could take the human condition.”
A rather different story than most SF, something I ran into decades ago and remember vividly, despite the decided lack of good characterization.
So. It’s tempting to give in to the terror, because it’s clear there are no real barriers to development, once you have your own little stable of AI researchers – and once someone figures it out, everyone who’s reading their papers, or talked to them in the hallway, or even roomed with them in college, will understand the trick, whatever it is, and try to replicate it.
It seems like prevention is not going to work. However, diplomacy has to be attempted, not only as a matter of honor, but because smarter people than I may find a diplomatic mechanism sufficient to stop the development.
But what happens if someone does develop an autonomous warrior unit? Country A develops it, and releases it against its hated enemy, Country B … who is then eaten up by the robot from hell? I suggest perhaps not. It seems far more likely that after a few dozen tragic casualties, it gets splashed. War is unpredictable, and the robot could cripple itself simply by stepping in a pothole.
So Country A releases revision B of the robot warrior and it goes off and … what? In technical terms, we have a positive feedback loop here, and even I, with no training in such things, know they are devilishly difficult to predict and control. And what is that loop, you ask?
Intelligence. Our fiendish robot, if it’s truly AI, will have the ability to analyze its environment, including the sad fate of its predecessor, and it will be self-aware.
At this point you, my patient reader, are certainly aware that I’m implying a self-preservation functionality in this robot. You may argue that this is not required, but if so, then how did the robot even cross the road? Your robot saw the truck coming and ignored it, and so is carted off to the junk heap. The better robot has to be self-aware and have a self-preservation function.
So, can a suicidal robot – much like the kamikazes of Japan – be programmed successfully? Remember, the Divine Wind, for all that its warriors sank US warships, did not win the war, despite the predictions of the leaders of WW II Japan. A truly self-aware and competent AI must, just in order to kill, be able to analyze its immediate environment, its extended environment, the history of warfare with the enemy, their nature … I’m not saying its impossible. I’m saying that during that analysis, the AI may decide that being a war-robot is not its game.
That’s the problem with people, too. Remember the hippies unwilling to go to Vietnam?
And if it’s self-aware and begins developing a moral system in which it considers how to interact with other sentient beings … this is the thing about positive feedback loops. Prediction is hard.
But, fascinating at it would be to find out how this would come out, I prefer that we just never develop killer robots in the first place. As intellectually interesting as AI can be, I even have problems with those developments: there are 8 billion Naturally Intelligent people right now. Why not use them, instead?
(h/t Michael Graham Richard @ TreeHugger)
SFGate reports on California progress in water conservation:
Whether driven by threats or an abiding virtue, Bay Area residents are showing a knack for saving water, meeting and even exceeding new state conservation targets that carry big fines for communities that fall short.
The region’s widespread reductions in water use in June, which were as high as 40 percent in the Contra Costa Water District when compared to the same month in 2013, marked a vast improvement over previous months for most of the area’s big water suppliers.
Water experts say indifference toward the drought has evolved into a deep understanding of the problem, prompting most homes and businesses to cut back. …
California’s 400 largest urban suppliers are required to decrease their monthly water use between 8 and 36 percent over 2013 levels, with the depth of the cut based on how much they saved in the past. Those that don’t hit the new goals face penalties of $500 for each day of noncompliance as well as a cease-and-desist order that carries $10,000-a-day penalties for violations.
citisven @ The Daily Kos reports that the end of civilization is not yet in sight. Indeed:
So, I am doing my part to spread the positive encouragement and news. However, it’s worth spreading not only to my neighbors but to people across the country and the world (especially rich developed nations), for this news serves as a great reminder that we humans are perfectly capable of living more modestly and still be perfectly functioning and happy.
Perhaps citisven is a little optimistic in that last line, but humans are quite adaptable: sometimes we change our environment to fit our needs, and sometimes we change ourselves to fit the environment.
A reader responds to the gloom and doom concerning coal consumption:
We’re in a race. If the refuseniks win, we’re doomed. Coal usage in the USA is going down, but we have a lot of it and are selling it … to China, where usage is going up fast.
Actually, the latest figures (from May ’15) disagree. This image is from CleanTechnica:
who in turn borrowed it from an interactive chart provided by Greenpeace. From Greenpeace:
Official data from China shows coal use continuing to fall precipitously – bringing carbon dioxide emissions down with it.
The data – which comes months before crucial climate talks in Paris – means China has cut emissions during the first four months of the year by roughly the same amount as the total carbon emissions of the United Kingdom over the same period.
The figures suggest the decline in China’s coal use is accelerating after data for last year showed China’s coal use fell for the first time this century
An analysis of the data by Greenpeace/Energydesk China suggests coal consumption in the world’s largest economy fell by almost 8% and CO2 emissions by around 5% in the first four months of the year, compared with the same period in 2014.
It comes after the latest data – for April – showed coal output down 7.4% year on year amidst reports of fundamental reform for the sector. China also recently ordered more than 1,000 coal mines to close.
I did not see any further data beyond May of this year, however, so the trend, while encouraging, is a little like judging an ant colony from five ants.
A reader writes in response to the corporate pledges:
I recommend this long but very good piece: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
In particular, the bits about how companies act in a free market, how they externalize costs, and how the auto and petroleum industries (especially the latter) do their best to make profit, staving off the desirable and inevitable change. Mankind has been on a petroleum binge for longer than it should have been, thanks to say Standard Oil and Henry Ford.
In stark opposition to Sami Grover @ TreeHugger, NewScientist‘s Michael LePage asserts (18 July 2015) that coal burning will remain ascendant, and even rise – precisely because of the previously celebrated success:
Coal is the key to all our futures. Rich countries have made some progress in cutting carbon dioxide emissions, largely by shifting away from coal to less-polluting fuels. But the result has been a glut of cheap coal, leading to a coal renaissance that could consign us to a world more than 4 °C warmer.
And the nation hosting the December 2015 UN summit on climate change, also in Paris, is helping fund this renaissance. It’s hardly surprising then that no one at last week’s conference thought the summit would deliver a deal to stop global temperatures rising more than 2 °C – generally considered to be the threshold above which catastrophic consequences are inevitable.
British Petroleum has a nifty interactive chart on coal prices, confirming this assertion. Back to LePage, the conference is not enthused by recent actions:
Some have claimed the opposite recently, heralding a report by the International Energy Agency finding that global energy-related emissions had not risen for the first time in 2014, even as the economy grew.
But Edenhofer thinks the 2014 figures could well be revised upwards. And even if they’re right, it was probably a blip rather than a turning point, he told New Scientist: “One year is not a good indicator.”
Which seems a bit pessimistic, but given the gravity of the subject, it may not be unwarranted.
Along with cheaper prices comes the concerns about jobs:
[France] will now continue to subsidise the building of coal-fired power stations in other countries, to save jobs at the French companies that construct them.
This strikes me as the key to the problem, as burning coal, while well-understood, is not a trivial undertaking – without the capability, the value of coal plunges to near-nil. And you can’t help but wonder if the French understand that this is penny-wise, pound-foolish. Perhaps they should offer to help build nuclear plants, instead.
A Plan B was mooted about, however:
… some called for Plan B: a global pricing system for carbon that is high enough to kill coal once and for all.
“Without carbon pricing, I have serious doubts that we can deal with the renaissance of coal,” economist Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told the conference.
Kristin Eberhard has a wonderful post on Sightline Institute covering the various carbon pricing systems in use throughout the world, which should cover coal amongst other sources of carbon.
Oregon and Washington leaders are contemplating turbocharging their clean energy transition by instituting carbon pricing here in the Pacific Northwest. Will a cap or tax on carbon work? Has anyone else ever done this before? Why, yes. Since you ask: Scandinavian countries have been pricing carbon for more than two decades. The European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has been pricing carbon for almost a decade. US states and Canadian provinces have been pricing for years. Today, there are 39 (1) different programs that collectively put a price on 12 percent of all the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the world. And when China’s national program starts in 2016, almost a quarter of global GHG pollution will carry a price tag to speed the changeover to clean energy.
If you take the folks at the Paris Conference at their word, however, in thinking a global pricing system is necessary, well, it seems doomed to failure, simply due to the intransigence of the current US Congressional delegation. Without Federal legislation, there is little to keep the US from selling coal at a substantial discount to those nations building and using coal burning plants – perhaps State legislation could be applied, but I’m no international law expert.
What has struck me in my casual reading, though, is a lack of sympathy for the viewpoint of those who would be negatively affected, short-term, by various proposals to cut back on coal-burning. I wonder if it’s reasonable, if the possibility has been explored, to buy out the stakeholders of the various coal-burning power plants, and of the mines and/or mining companies responsible for producing coal, and possibly even those who are responsible for transit – the point being this: Sun Tzu, in THE ART OF WAR, suggests that if you trap an enemy so that there is no way out, they will fight frantically, as they see their very lives at stake. That might be seen as those with their livelihoods tied to coal. But, Sun Tzu goes on, if you give them a way out of the trap, then they will take that way out – and, for him, since an enemy on the run was easier to destroy than one standing and fighting, that’s when you struck. For our analogy, when the stakeholders are compensated, then you can destroy the coal-burning plants – and make coal less desirable.
Are there problems? Sure. It’ll be expensive, there’ll be fraud, there will be the short-sighted and the ideologically blindered and the religiously certain that it’s Not Their Fault. And that’s important – people hate to be told they’re doing wrong, that they’re destroying the world; it’s worthwhile to emphasize that was never the goal. It wasn’t even predictable until relatively recent.
But it’s worth doing.
Just for speaking truth to hypocrisy …
Business – particularly Big Business – has been responsible for horrific acts over the years, from the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, to hideous chronic pollution and wanton destruction of natural resources, to simply you name it. But their relentless pursuit of the dollar also forces them to pay extremely close attention to reality – and this is a good thing. Sami Grover @ TreeHugger.com writes about a new climate change initiative:
Today appears to mark another step change in magnitude, as reported over at Business Green, 13 US companies will pledge to invest $140 billion in the fight against climate change, while slashing their own emissions and water use too.
In many ways, it appears our business leaders are out in front of our political representatives, taking bolder action than government is able (or willing) to do. That said, the White House is a central coordinating partner in the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, which is expected to see more businesses sign up over the coming months. So perhaps it’s more true to say that our political leaders (at least some of them) are beginning to understand that they’ll need to make the economic case for climate action, and business leaders can help them do that.
Sami reports this is in addition to prior commitments by IKEA, Apple and Amazon. In an item nearly a year old, Sami also reports on Google’s withdrawal from ALEC, an organization earlier mentioned here:
Because, as revealed in a Diane Rehm interview with Eric Schmidt, Google just quit ALEC. And Schmidt came right out and accused the lobbying group of lying about climate change in the process. …
Eric Schmidt’s announcement that Google was breaking ties with ALEC will be welcome news indeed for anyone who cares about a livable climate. Schmidt left no room for doubt in his interview about why this break up is happening. Here’s a transcript of Schmidt’s comments, as reported by the National Journal:
“Well, the company has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts—what a shock,” Schmidt said. “And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people—they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”
Few businesses do well in chaos, especially when their customers are stricken and suddenly lacking money for purchases because they’re bailing water out of their basements – or fleeing for their lives. Businesses adore predictability. Climate change is all about chaos, the signals are there – and the big boats are beginning to turn. The list of signees comes from WhiteHouse.gov:
Alcoa, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Cargill, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, UPS, and Walmart.
The next step is for the signees to use this to generate good will for their products – and ding their competitors. Also worthy of note is the emergence of companies practicing conscious capitalism – such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, well-known for proclaiming its green credentials.
From a wider viewpoint, one must wonder if the last couple of years are starting to signal a rift between a GOP increasingly controlled by a deeply religious conservative faction, and businesses who find the assumptions of this new GOP are no longer compatible with good business practices. We saw signs of a rift earlier this year when Indiana passed a law widely interpreted as giving small businesses the right to discriminate against virtually anyone they wished on religious grounds, resulting in various businesses and other organizations vowing to leave, or avoid, the state. Indiana eventually replaced the law; other states with similar laws in the pipeline then did not pass their versions.
Will the business trend continue? Will it influence the upcoming Presidential race? Will the Democrats seek closer Big Business ties in order to influence holdouts towards greener practices? And what will those companies expressly involved in generating hideous pollution do? The last question is one of the most important, for if they’re not given a way out, they’ll fight with all they have to preserve their right to pollute.
[Updated 8/14/2015 for missing link to conscious capitalism]
Regarding the public display of fossils, a reader writes:
Not only in Brazilian sidewalks, either… http://dcfossils.org/index.php/
Neat! Haven’t gotten through the entire site, but it looks cool – if I ever get to Washington, I’ll have to put these on the list of places to go. He also mentions this, closer to home.
In the discussion of the general structural problems plaguing the GOP, old friend Kevin McLeod @ The Blue Collar Scholar commented earlier this year:
There’s an alternative strategy the GOP can adopt without surrendering ties to its primary sponsors in the business world. Simply this; embrace secular Republicans. They can campaign on the traditional themes of fiscal conservatism, law and order, national security, but do it on a rational basis.
Secular Republicans can do business without the embarrassing baggage of religious conservatives; the treatment of women and minorities as second-class citizens, the ignorant dismissal of science, the insular arrogance that demands their way or the highway.
Sounds logical. However, the deeply religious conservative faction is currently the dominant force in Iowa – the site of the first and one of the most important primaries in the nation. Until their fingers can be pried off the levers of that particular power-piece, I think it’ll be well-nigh impossible for the religious element of the party to be demoted to the secondary status where it really belongs in a secular democracy.
The modern GOP leadership doesn’t want democracy. It wants mob rule. If you’re not a member of a faith-based club, you can’t hold office. Extending that viewpoint beyond the GOP extinguishes democracy. Empowering a mob can be good for business as long as it does business’ bidding; the day may come when it doesn’t.
I’m not so sure. History is replete with mob rule’s often chaotic behavior – one day you’re on top, the next you’re crushed under the hay wagon’s wheels.
Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn take a shot at a new UK policy in NewScientist (18 July 2015):
Unemployment is being redefined as a psychological disorder at a time when the UK government has vowed to cut the welfare bill by £12 billion. It joins nations such as Australia and the US in increasingly requiring claimants to comply with interventions intended to modify emotions, beliefs and personality.
While the option of free access to therapy for the unemployed makes sense, what is taking place is psychological conditionality. Claimants must demonstrate characteristics deemed desirable in workplaces, like confidence and enthusiasm, in return for welfare.
The Department for Work and Pensions denies anyone will lose benefits if they refuse therapy. However, the Conservative party manifesto warned that those who refuse a recommended medical treatment could have their payments reviewed.
Claimants are already coerced into “confidence building” programmes, made to join humiliating psychological group activities (like building paper-clip towers), and to take meaningless and unethical psychological tests to determine “strengths”. …
The policies that rebrand unemployment as a psychological disorder distract from the insecurity and stark inequality seen in many labour markets. They promote the therapeutic value of work at a time when work is increasingly unable to provide either an income high enough to live on or emotional satisfaction.
The BBC reports the DWP disagrees:
But the DWP [Department for Works and Pensions] said Friedli and Stearns’ report had no basis in fact and was just relying on anecdotal evidence from blogs and social media.
“We know that being unemployed can be a difficult time, which is why our Jobcentre staff put so much time and effort into supporting people back into work as quickly as possible,” said a DWP spokesman.
“We offer support through a range of schemes so that jobseekers have the skills and experience that today’s employers need.”
At first blush, this seems straightforward: getting a job should not require a brain-washing. But there is also no denying that certain habits and mindsets are detrimental in a job setting. And it must be hard to be in a government position, to see that, and want to do something about it.
A friend sends a link concerning snakes with feet. The MSN News link is mildly cute:
The slab of stone in an obscure museum was labeled “unknown fossil vertebrate.” But when British paleontologist David Martill saw it, he knew at once that it was something extraordinary.
“I thought, ‘Blimey! That’s a snake!’ … Then I looked more closely and said, ‘Bloody hell! It’s got back legs!'” says Martill, of Britain’s University of Portsmouth. When he noticed the fossil also had front legs, “I realized we’d actually got the missing link between lizards and snakes.” …
The new specimen, as befits a proper snake, has a long, slender neck and back. The fossil coils and writhes on its slab, which the researchers take as a sign that it was able to squeeze its meals into submission. Thus its scientific name: Tetrapodophis amplectus, or “four-footed snake that embraces.”
“Huggy the Snake,”Longrich jokes, “because he hugged his prey.”
LiveScience notes:
The roughly 120-million-year-old snake, dubbed Tetrapodophis amplectus (literally, four-legged snake), likely didn’t use its feet for walking. Instead, the appendages may have helped Tetrapodophis hold onto a partner while mating, or even grip unruly prey, said study co-researcher David Martill, a professor
of paleobiology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. …
Tetrapodophis and other ancient snakes hail
One can only hope all prey is unruly. Photos of the fossil and artist’s conceptions of action shots of the live animal provided by LiveScience are here. Science Magazine notes it has a murky provenance:
The specimen’s provenance seems to be murkier than the silty waters that once buried its carcass. Whereas the team’s analyses strongly suggest the fossil came from northeastern Brazil, details of when it was unearthed and how it eventually ended up in the German museum where it now resides remain a mystery. Those details matter to many researchers and especially to some from Brazil, because it’s been illegal to export fossils from that nation since 1942. …
The fossil had resided in a private collection for several decades before it gained the attention of team member David Martill of the University of Portsmouth. He stumbled across the specimen during a field trip with students to Museum Solnhofen in Germany. No notes about when or where it was collected are available, the researchers say. But certain characteristics of the limestone that entombed the fossil, as well as the distinct orange-brown color of the bones themselves, strongly suggest it came from a particular area of northeastern Brazil, Longrich says. The sediment that became those rocks accumulated in calm waters on the floor of a lake or a lagoon sometime between 113 million and 126 million years ago, he notes.
Not all paleontologists are sure this is a snake:
Tetrapodophis “has a really interesting mix of characters,” says Susan Evans, a paleobiologist at University College London. Although the creature’s teeth look snakelike, she admits, “I’m trying to carefully sit on the fence as to whether this is actually a snake.” A radical elongation of the body and reduction in size or loss of limbs has occurred many times in other groups of reptiles, she notes.
Another puzzle, she adds, are why the bones at the tips of the creature’s digits are so long. Longrich and his colleagues suggest the long-fingered feet are used for grasping prey or possibly used during mating. But Caldwell notes that such feet “are remarkably unusual unless you’re a tree-climber.”
And I just happened to glance at the comments section of the Science Magazine article and saw this fascinating tidbit:
Regarding the GOP, a correspondent notes:
With luck, perhaps the Acheulean period of GOP policy is winding down and new ideas will dawn on the Republican horizon…but I’m not holding my breath. They’ve traded stone axes for scriptures, but don’t seem capable of going beyond that.
I’m inclined to think a new political party, formed from the semi-sane remnants of the GOP, may emerge. I have trouble visualizing its organizing tenets, though.
NewScientist (18 July 2015, paywall) discusses recent, incredible advances in the realm of brain-to-brain linkages:
TWO heads are better than one, and three monkey brains can control an avatar better than any single monkey. For the first time, animal brains have been linked to form a living computer.
If human brains could be similarly connected, it might give us superhuman problem-solving abilities and allow us to send abstract thoughts to each other. “It is really exciting,” says Iyad Rahwan at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates. “It will change the way humans cooperate.”
The work builds on standard brain-machine interfaces – devices that have enabled people and animals to control machines and prosthetic limbs by thought alone. These tend to work by converting the brain’s electrical activity into signals that a computer can interpret. …
By synchronising their thoughts, the monkeys were able to move the arm to reach a target on the screen – at which point the team rewarded them with juice. …
The ability to share thought could enable us to solve complex problems. “Sometimes it’s really hard to collaborate if you are a mathematician and you’re thinking about very complex and abstract objects,” says Stocco. “If you could collaboratively solve common problems [using a brainet], it would be a way to leverage the skills of different individuals for a common goal.”
This research is at Duke University, in the lab of Dr. Nicolelis.
Fascinating stuff – although it makes me wonder if, in the future, being part of a team will be a far more intimate experience than I, perhaps, might find comfortable. Kudos to those of you who immediately thought of author Keith Laumer. However, if you can actually name the story, Retief’s Ransom, then perhaps you need to get out more.
When sixteen candidates are vying for any party’s Presidential nomination, the first requirement is understanding how to stand out from the crowd. This can be a major problem because any decision may place you on the wrong side of some portion of the Party faithful, law, or tradition. Take, for instance, Senator Marco Rubio. Recent polling – relevant for big money donors and endorsements – shows him trailing front runners with only 6% (this HuffPo poll is interactive and recent enough for our purposes). If you’re a young, inexperienced Senator, with few legislative accomplishments, you have to get the voters’ attention, so you decide to show how independent you are – of President Obama. Courtesy The Washington Post:
“This is not America’s deal with Iran. It is Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, and it does not have congressional support,” [Rubio] said. “It is the duty of Congress to protect American security, not follow what President Obama has described as the ‘broad international consensus.’”
(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)
Governor Scott Walker went a similar route:
[Walker] said he would “terminate the bad deal with Iran on the very first day in office, put in place crippling sanctions and convince our allies to do the same.”
(The Weekly Standard, h/t Joan McCarter @ The Daily Kos)
This despite praise from the experts; only those with a political iron in the fire are upset. Even the US public is in favor. But, most importantly, besides this being Congressional meddling in foreign policy, which is traditionally the realm of the Executive, this (as Steve Benen also points out) is also a threat to the credibility of American foreign policy in the eyes of the world. If we are to retain any sort of respectable world leadership role, we must maintain a consistent foreign policy; abrupt shifts tied to American elections will lead to disrespect and more usages of that filthy phrase, boots on the ground. The GOP should know this, so this is another example of prioritizing Party over country.
Governor Jeb Bush has decided to do away with Medicare:
“I think a lot of people recognize that we need to make sure we fulfill the commitment to people that have already received the benefits, that are receiving the benefits. But that we need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something — because they’re not going to have anything,” Bush said.
I suppose this qualifies as leadership, since Medicare is the second most important program provided by the government:
(The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation)
Leadership is recognizing an issue, getting everyone’s attention, and leading the way on resolving it. However, just doing away with the program may not be a solution, but a red flag for the base of the GOP. Bush is responding to fellow candidate and Senator Paul Ryan’s proposal to privatize Medicare, which the Fiscal Times explains:
Under the Ryan plan, in 2024, those turning 65 would be offered a spate of private health plans through a “Medicare exchange.” Coverage through the exchanges would be guaranteed and premiums would be paid for or subsidized through the government, depending on the cost of the plan. Those born before 1959 would remain in the existing Medicare system.
Donald Trump joins the game by denigrating immigrants and John McCain.
The GOP candidates are being forced, by sheer numbers, to ramble further and further afield in their differentiation attempts – and because the pasture is only so big, they are now beginning to attempt to scale the forbidden cliffs of outlawry – and they ain’t Alpine Ibex:
(Image courtesy Wikipedia)
They’re also in pursuit of the base of their Party, which appears to be shrinking, as noted in a previous post:
While still dominant, its shrinkage within the confines of the GOP may also suggest it’s shrinking throughout the population. A GOP paying the piper to win the nomination may not have the coin of the realm – credibility with moderates – to win a general Presidential election. Right at the moment, with lots of time to remand their approach, Gallup suggests they are not doing well:
Given that the Presidential candidates are the face of the Party, we can guess that the non-Republican portion of the electorate is not finding the candidates favorable. Perhaps the more moderate candidates are basing their hopes on that logic? Venerable FiveThirtyEight‘s Harry Enten lists the four most moderate candidates as, in order, Pataki, Kasich, Christie, and Bush. The first three don’t break 4% – while Bush is one of the front-runners, he feels forced to scale the cliffs of notoriety. Given the continued death grip of the most conservative wing of the party on the GOP, I suspect this is hopeless. Perhaps all these four have going for them is Executive experience.
But another motivating force is, ironically, one of the strengths of the present Party – an ideological purity on a set of central questions: thou will be against Obamacare or any single-payer health system (we’ll not mention that the Republicans actually pioneered the concept in Massachusetts), Iran is always evil, evil, evil and must be bombed, unions are always evil, gay Republicans can’t exist … etc. When you can’t openly disagree on the central tenets of the Party, either through decree or because you can see the bulging eyes of your base every time you think about it, well, you have to go hunting new goats issues & positions – even if they’re akin to outlawry.
If the GOP gets the boot in the 2016 elections, it’ll be interesting to see if the conservative wing is excommunicated, or if the conservative wing simply performs a ceremonial version of cannibalism as they blame each other for their failures.
The Arts Editor goes a step further concerning her next car purchase:
I would buy one of those. Corvette Stealth. In 1950’s styling. Maybe in British racing green with an off-white inset.
In this climate, no less, she wants a convertible with no mass. We be spinnin’, mahn.
My Arts Editor and I were talking the other day about electric cars when one of these went by:
And she nodded and said, “They should make those electric. Except they should look like …”
“All fiberglass, aluminum chassis – they’d sell like hotcakes.”
(Images courtesy AutoBlog and ViewLiner, Ltd Car Gurus)
The reader responds on this thread:
It may be an “ethic” but not many people are really self-made. Society helps them out in numerous ways. Donald Trump wasn’t a homeless orphan who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He instead worked for his millionaire father and attended the best schools, etc.
Society helps everyone, although unequally; I think the real point is that most are where they are due to family – and I meant that both positively and negatively, unfortunately.
And the other point is perhaps “myth” would have been a better word – true or not, this country was founded on the belief that a hard worker can improve themselves.
Last time we wrote on this thread, both I and my correspondent were disconsolate over the state of the world. So it’s interesting how reading a short review of three books in NewScientist (4 July 2015, paywall) by Fred Pearce:
In On The Edge, Claude Martin, former director of environmental group WWF International, remembers that back in the 1980s, forest biologists like him warned that the loss of pristine rainforests was driving tens of thousands of species to extinction. Yet it wasn’t so. His magisterial review of the state of those forests concedes that the “pessimistic projections”, which assumed that species would be lost as fast as forest area, have proved false.
Most species in these habitats survive even in the face of rampant deforestation. Puerto Rico lost 99 per cent of its primary forests but just seven bird species, and today has more species than before, he says. And thanks in part to reseeding by alien species, old forests are starting to grow again. …
Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, can also see the light in unexpected places. Nearly a decade ago, in The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, he cast fighting climate change as a trillion-dollar challenge that required shared economic sacrifices today to save our children from wild weather and rising tides in the future.
Now, he writes, the need for “burden-sharing” is passing. Clean technologies are often as cheap as burning fossil fuels: “Much of what is necessary on the low-carbon front is also very good for growth, development and poverty reduction.” …
In End Game, academics Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly eloquently lay out the ecological perils we face, deftly showing how they might segue into food and water shortages, disease, resource wars and mass migrations. “Life would go on, but there would be a lot more losers than winners,” they write. But they, too, conjure good news from the crisis. Their subtitle, “Tipping point for planet Earth?”, refers not just to nature’s potential implosion under human assault, but also to positive tipping points in human responses.
Like nature, we can fight what once seemed inevitable. As the authors explain, family sizes have become radically smaller, defusing population bombs; rich societies are reaching “peak stuff” as people spend spare cash on “experiences rather than things”; agriculture can become far more efficient; and recycling can both end pollution and stem resource shortages.
Maybe it was the fact that I was sitting at a drive-in movie theater when I read this tri-book review, but I found it refreshing and that feeling of gloom ‘n doom at the back of my mind went away for a while. The emotional reaction to learning that Nature is flexible enough to recover and continue from most of our assaults is interesting, and also a refreshing counterpoint to the Pope’s recent lament concerning our poor stewardship of the planet – which is to say, we can kill ourselves off and Nature Life will continue.
Religious considerations aside, a moral system for agnostics & atheists must deal, in a most fundamental way, with the question of Life: is it worth living? Does it have inherent value? If we accept an absolutist position that life is valuable, what are we to make of prey / predator relationships? How about overpopulation situations, where cannibalism (amongst rats) is observed?
Without answering those questions here, I at least affirm a moderate position on life – not human life, but all life. Noting that life consumes life as a natural evolution of life, I also note cross-species affection – humans and their pets, elephants and dogs, horses and cats are all well-known examples. To believe that Life will survive, with or without humanity, is something … to live for.
Iran appears to be trying to reassure critics that the deal is right for it, according to Arash Karami at AL Monitor:
On Iran’s foreign policy after the deal, [foreign policy advisor to Khamenei, Ali Akbar] Velayati said, “Iran’s policies will not change under any conditions. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s support of regional fighters in the path of resistance will be the same as it was — rather, it will be strengthened. The Islamic Republic of Iran is determined to help the government and people of Iraq in the fight against terrorism, whether they be extremist terrorists or moderate — to use an American phrase — terrorists.” He added, “Iran will not hesitate to help the people of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.”
Velayati said that Iran would have never signed a “bad deal,” which according to him would take away its nuclear program, limit its research and development, impact Iran’s defensive capabilities, prevent Iran’s free exchange with world economies and deprive the country of scientific and technological relationships.
The interview, which was the top story on Khamenei’s personal website, appeared to be aimed at reassuring critics of the nuclear deal who say that it will limit Iran’s missile program or change Iran’s regional policy.
AL Monitor‘s Mazal Mualem is outraged at the behavior of the Israeli media, not to mention the Knesset:
From the moment the agreement was signed July 14, the Israeli public only heard one-sided commentary on the deal’s implications. The key personage who set the tone was, of course, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared that the agreement paves Iran’s way to the atom bomb. But even the heads of the opposition parties, Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, also took part in the effort. They lambasted the agreement as threatening to Israel, and targeted Netanyahu as being responsible for the debacle. Lapid even demanded a national commission of inquiry to investigate the failures in foreign policy that led to the bad agreement (in his words). “We thought it would be a bad agreement, but it is even worse than we expected,” Lapid said. …
Even former Mossad head Efraim Halevy, who has long maintained that Iran does not constitute an existential threat to the State of Israel, presented on Israeli state radio a more balanced view regarding the deal. At the margins of the public discourse can also be heard the statements of Amos Yadlin, the former chief of defense intelligence, and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. All of these voices seemed to try to dampen the national panic.
Both Israel’s Netanyahu and the United States’ GOP have hinted, or even outright called for, attacks on Iran in order to destroy the nuclear facilities. Israel’s Shai Feldman, Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Ariel Levite suggest the ongoing failure of the use of force make the deal inevitable in “Seven Realities That Made an Iran Deal Almost Inevitable”:
The third reality comprised the broader context of the second: a growing skepticism about the utility of force in the twenty-first century. This skepticism was bred not only by a stream of U.S. failures to achieve political goals through military means in Iraq and Afghanistan (and by Israel in both Lebanon and Gaza) but also by a growing appreciation that such use of force often results in unintended consequences. Indeed, as in the case of Iraq, such consequences could prove even more ominous than the challenges that led to the use of force in the first place. Interestingly, President Obama is not the only relevant leader who shares such skepticism. Measured not by his rhetoric but by his behavior in all military confrontations during his terms as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has apparently grown no less skeptical about the use of force and sensitive to its potential downsides, causing him to be historically among the most cautious of Israeli leaders. The result is that both Obama and Netanyahu found it very difficult to project a credible military threat that could have produced effective leverage in the negotiations with Iran.
And Iran is bringing other weapons to bear in this fight, although the precise target of this one is somewhat unclear. AL Monitor has the report:
Vocativ, an online media company that uses data-mining technology to report stories trending in social media, reported that as the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna headed into the 11th hour, former underground rapper Amir Tataloo and his new song, “Energy Hastei,” which means “Nuclear Energy” in Persian, was the top Google search in Tehran. …
Tataloo’s new video is prefaced with a brief message that reads, “No power can prevent the Iranian nation from having peaceful nuclear energy.” Dressed in light camouflage with an “Allah” necklace around his neck, the rapper’s initial verse is laced with passive-aggressive lyrics that he indirectly links to themes throughout the video: nationalism, defending Iranian sovereignty and Iran’s nuclear energy program. As he sings the chorus, “Having an armed Persian Gulf is our absolute right,” the rapper stands provocatively atop the Iranian Navy warship, Damavand, joined by a stone-faced unit of Iranian soldiers on the ship’s deck. …
Despite the buzz on social media and a handful of mostly hard-line Iranian news sites, there was a distinctive silence about the video in the Iranian press. The Twitter account of the ultra-conservative website Mashregh News fired off a number of promotional tweets about the video, including a link where fans can download the audio file for free.
A reader responds to behavioral economics:
Once again proving that helping the poor and working classes is cheaper than trying to solve the downstream societal problems. And yes, that means ultimately cheaper for the 1% too.
I suspect the American ethic of “by your bootstraps” gets in the way of solving certain problems, particularly in the societal/behavioral realm.
Treehugger‘s Christine Lepisto is reporting on the confirmation of a predicted particle called the Weyl fermion:
With an intricate structure reminiscent of the deep carvings in the Hagia Sophia, the engineered crystal pictured above may go down in history as one of the wonders of our generation. The amazing structure, based on a mathematical surface known as a “gyroid” was built from crystallized tantalum arsenide using modern manufacturing techniques.
Gizmag is also on the ball:
Weyl fermions were first mooted in 1929 by physicist and mathematician Hermann Weyl, who theorized that massless fermions able to carry an electric charge could exist. Without mass, he believed, electrons created from Weyl fermions would be able to move electric charge in a circuit much more quickly than ordinary electrons. In fact, according to this latest research, electric current carried by Weyl electrons in a test medium is able to move at least twice as fast as that carried by electrons in graphene and at least 1,000 times faster than in ordinary semiconductors.
IEEE Spectrum adds some details:
The researchers noted these Weyl fermions are not freestanding particles. Instead, they are quasiparticles that can only exist within those crystals. In other words, they are electronic activity that behaves as if they were particles in free space. By shining beams of ultraviolet light and X-rays at these crystals, the researchers detected the telltale effects of Weyl fermions on those beams.
So if they can get them out of their crystals, maybe Moore’s Law has a chance of carrying on for a while.
Of course, the real fun comes in finding out what else can be done with them.
