Broadening our horizons: from negotiating and diversity... to solace regarding viruses.

A bit late for the weekend, here's a roundup of items you'll find nowhere else. Or at leastdeem uniquely worthy of attention!

First. An excellent missive by David Bray and the Atlantic Council calls for a GeoTech Alliance of those nations and other entities who share a common goal of spreading tech-enhanced power widely, rather than falling into the ancient pattern of power concentration by wealth, position, party or race. Embracing that power-dispersive revolution is the main thing that enabled creative development and burgeoning sci-tech advances (albeit unevenly), in recent centuries. 

Turning away from that power-dispersal approach - back toward power concentration - directly correlates with our recent declines.

This choice becomes crucial as newer technologies can vastly multiply the effects, perhaps empowering the vast numbers of skilled and confident workers and consumers who make markets work well, along with vast numbers of skilled and confident voters who invigorate democracy.

The alternative - a return to 6000 years of dismal top-down rule by diktat - is being promoted by self-interested elites across the globe. Perhaps because they realize it is their best and last chance to restore that brutally stupid Old Order.

I agree with this article, top to bottom. Except that I believe this turnaround must entail very specific actions, above all restoring the place of FACTS and objective reality and determinable argument and negotiated "politics" to a nation and world where "politics" have been deliberately and systematically destroyed.

== Can we find middle ground? ==

For many years I’ve asserted that our salvation as a people, nation, species and world lies in harnessing the one thing that has ever worked for us… honest-negotiation based on goodwill and a willingness to adapt to facts. Implicit in that are all the terms of import: competition, cooperation, accountability, honesty…. This is the root truth underlying The Transparent Society, and my longstanding proposal for Disputation Arenas. And yes, it’s hard to do. Look at the sophists and delusion junkies around you… and that one in the mirror. It’s amazing that any human civilization tried – and somewhat succeeded – to put the positive notion of growth through accountability into practice. (And no surprise at all that it is now under full scale assault.)

Now Reddit has sponsored a site for those few adults who are willing to put this ideal into practice, by inviting challenge to things they currently believe. Reddit's 'Change My View' community becomes a dedicated site.

== a better way to argue for diversity ==

David Ellerman is an expert on Locke and on liberal vs natural rights bases for libertarianism. His new book is The Uses of Diversity: Essays in Polycentricity. Here’s my blurb about it; “For more than sixty centuries humans languished under centralized hierarchies - monarchies, oligarchies, theocracies and feudal, fascist, communist or klepto-aristocracies - and all proved spectacularly awful at statecraft. Gradually, it dawned on us that nature abhors oversimplification, for some very good reasons. The Uses of Diversity: Essays in Polycentricity explores many of the opportunities and constraints that have started, gradually, allowing human societies to reap benefits from complexity." 

Over the long run, the pragmatic benefits of diversity will weigh far more heavily than moralistic chidings about it. Consider that 99% of previous cultures would have laughed at such chidings, calling them weird. “Stop trying to impose YOUR diversity fetishism on us! We have other cultural values and how dare you demand we adopt yours!” It is that easy to respond to liberal lectures that are ONLY morality-based, as we are finding with our obstinate confederate neighbors.

To be clear, I AGREE with those moral chidings! My family and I have benefited immensely from the spreading of horizons of tolerance and below I will offer links to "horizon theory." Tolerance and diversity are wellsprings of justice.

But diversity in a culture is also spectacularly beneficial and practical, as David Ellerman clearly shows. And that PRACTICAL benefit not only supports diversity, it utterly overwhelms all attempted "cultural" refutations. Our Enlightenment Experiment in tolerant inclusion -- while flawed and needing agonizing incremental improvement for two centuries -- has been simply vastly more successful, creative, happier, healthier and better at discovering errors than any other. And it keeps getting better when we are free and tolerant and diverse.

== Will we again be a society of ideas? TV tells! ==

Anyone out there recall "my" TV show? I was a cast member on "The Architechs," A way-cool design show. ("Five geniuses have 48 hours to come up with...") This pilot shows us coming up with a new design to replace the humvee. Remember this was during the Iraq Wars. See the pilot.

Something to help pass the time? The second pilot - "Getting in and out of burning buildings" - was even better! We invented TWENTY new ways!

(See also: http://htyp.org/The_ArchiTECHS)

I was also a regular on History's most popular show ever: "Life After People."

Alas, History was transitioning to become the Bigfoot Channel and our show stopped after just a few episodes.

== a little perspective might help? ==

December 1979, NPR ran an evening show called "unpacking the eighties" which had some of the most clever riffs I ever heard, including a song about the terrible flu we'd all get, around 1985... and in this age when nothing is supposedly ever lost or un-findable, I can't find a trace of this masterpiece, anywhere, with any combo of search words. I think the artist was named "Jesse" something, but can't be sure. Here's a riff I remember by heart:

IT’S A VIRUS*

Back in the Pleistocene,
When we were still marine,
a virus launched a quest,
to be the perfect guest
And re-arranged our genes.

So to this very day,
Whether you grok or pray
all your inheritors
count on those visitors
And what they make you pay.

.
REFRAIN

It’s a virus,
It inspired us,
to rise above the mud.
It’s a virus,
It’s desirous,
of your very flesh and blood.

Now I know your body’s burning,
But don’t give up the ghost.
Tiny viruses are turning you
Into the perfect... host.

.
Though you may curse microbes
who make you blow your nose,
evolution bends
to what a virus sends,
making us recompose.

Though when you least expect
You may be struck down next
thank the virus, he
put us in misery,
But then he gave us sex!


It’s a virus,
Its inspired us,
to rise above the mud.
It’s a virus,
It’s desirous,
of your very flesh and blood.

Now I know your body’s burning,
But don’t give up the ghost.
Tiny viruses are turning you
Into the perfect... host.

Originally from a 1979  NPR show “Unpacking the 80s”.

Italics passages recited by memory.

Non-italics verses made up by DB

Hawking vs the Terminator! Plus BASIC at 50! Blood Moons! Americans are weird! Plus… more science!

Stephen Hawking, plus physicists Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek and AI expert Stuart Russell, have penned an editorial -- Transcending Complacency on Super-Intelligent Machines -- urging caution in research aimed at creating artificial intelligences. As if Hollywood has not already wagged that finger at us, plenty of times, already!

To be clear, Hawking does not (as many in media have misquoted him) say that AI in itself would be humanity's "worst mistake." He very clearly states that the mistake would be paying too little attention to our responsibilities in the creation process. Taking insufficient care to get it right.

I know many members of the AI research community and this topic is widely discussed. But how do you take 'precautions' to keep new cybernetic minds friendly, when 
(1) we don't know which of six very different, general types of approaches to this problem might eventually bear fruit and 
(2) it is clear that the one method that cannot work is "laws of robotics" of Asimov fame.

I explore all six approaches in various works of fiction and nonfiction. One of the six approaches -- the one least-studied, of course -- offers what I deem our best hope for a "soft landing," in which human civilization and some recognizable version of our species would remain confidently in command of its own destiny.

At the opposite extreme is this possibility: AI might arrive that's deliberately designed to be predatory, parasitical, ruthless and destructive, in its very core and purpose. Alas, this is exactly the approach that is receiving more funding - and in secret - than all other forms of AI combined. And no, I am not talking about the military!

== How it all got started ==

Let's move back to a much earlier stretch of this road. A fun article in Time Magazine (online) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the clunky but epochal programming language BASIC. Computer pioneer Harry McCracken traces the history of BASIC, how it was designed to provide a portal for average students to access programming, and how it helped to launch both the PC revolution and the Microsoft empire.

McCracken cites my famous (or infamous) SALON article -- Why Johnny Can't Code -- about the demise of programming language accessibility in our modern computers -- how this had a tragic and harmful side-effect, eliminating from school textbooks the shared experience of introductory programming exercises that -- for one decade or so -- exposed millions of gen-Xers to small tastes of programming. Far more than almost any millennials receive.

And no, I was not praising BASIC as a language, but rather the notion that there should be SOME kind of “lingua franca” included in all computers and tablets etc. For a decade, Basic was so universally available that textbook publishers put simple programming exercises in most standard math and science texts. Teachers assigned them, and thus, a far higher fraction of students gained a little experience fiddling with 12 line programs that would make a pixel move… and thus knew, in their guts, that every dot on every screen obeys an algorithm. That it’s not magic, it only looks that way. Apple and Microsoft and RedHat could meet and settle this in a day --after which textbook publishers and teachers could go back to assigning marvelous little computer exercises, a great way to introduce millions of kids to… the basics.

For those who want the simplest way to re-access BASIC, one of the readers of my "Johnny Can't Code" article went ahead and provided a turnkey, web-accessed module that you can use instantly to run old (or new) programs.

Have a look at "QuiteBasic"… one of the coolest things any of my readers were ever inspired to produce.

Alas, word has not reached the textbook committees. In a modern era when computers run everything, far fewer kids are exposed to programming than in the 1980s and 1990s. Are you really okay with that?

== Speaking of tech anniversaries ==

John Naughton, published a fascinating article for the Observer, "25 things you might not know about the web on its 25th birthday." The big picture perspectives are important, but one especially stands out to me:

Number 18 -- The web needs a micro-payment system. "In addition to being just a read-only system, the other initial drawback of the web was that it did not have a mechanism for rewarding people who published on it. That was because no efficient online payment system existed for securely processing very small transactions at large volumes. (Credit-card systems are too expensive and clumsy for small transactions.) But the absence of a micro-payment system led to the evolution of the web in a dysfunctional way: companies offered "free" services that had a hidden and undeclared cost, namely the exploitation of the personal data of users. This led to the grossly tilted playing field that we have today, in which online companies get users to do most of the work while only the companies reap the financial rewards."

I've been working for some time on innovations that (in collaboration with others) could utterly transform the web (and incidentally save the profession of journalism) by making micro payments workable and effective. Got patents too!  That and $3.65 will get you a small cappuccino.

== Is the West - especially America - just weird? ==

A large fraction of social science research has focused on the most-accessible supply of survey and test subjects -- westerners and especially Americans -- under the assumption that "we're all the same under the skin."Hence tests that dive below obvious cultural biases ought to show what's basically human. But lo and behold, it seems that westerners and especially Americans are "weird" compared to almost all other cultures, in ways exposed by simple Prisoners' Dilemma type games and many others that study - say - individuality.

In fact, anyone who compares western - and especially American - values, processes, history and so on, compared to almost any other culture that ever existed, would have been able to tell you that. (Californians are even weirder! Ask Robert Heinlein.) The question is: "weird" as in dangerously unhinged? Or in the sense of "our one chance to escape the traps that mired every other civilization into a pit of dashed hopes and potential?" The jury is still out.

== Art and theology? ==

Speaking of cryptic time messages… Charles Smith (and some others) pointed out a fascinating aspect of The centerpiece image in Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings… "Apparently, Michelangelo placed god and various angels within what is clearly the outline of a human brain. Am I imagining this? Maybe, but I doubt it. Having dissected many cadavers, he knew his anatomy. He was trying to tell us something about the human mind and its relationship to the idea of god… the idea that man created god in his own image."

It's even better. The deity's legs are sticking out through the cerebellum and his hand of creation emerges from the prefrontal lobes.

Aw heck, let's stay with "theology" for a while, this time in quotation marks because it is the raging foolish kind. Mega best-sellers are out there proclaiming portent in the "blood moon."

Astronomers apply no significance to the way lunar eclipses - or 'blood moons" - sometimes come in groups of four or "tetrads. But that has not prevented a spate of blood moon mysticism. The four eclipses in this tetrad occur on April 15 (last month) and Oct. 8, 2014, and April 4 and Sept. 28 next year… all of them occurring during Jewish holidays! Which has provoked a bunch of Christian (not Jewish) mystical last-days mongering. Both of the ones in April occur during Passover, and the ones in October occur during the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles.

I'll leave it to you to find these sites (Google "blood moon prophecy") but at one level it is just more of the dopey millennialism I talk about here… wherein meme-pushers sell the sanctimony drug-high of in-group "knowledge" to a portion of the public who do not like the very idea of the Future and yearn for it to just go away.

In this case, the "coincidental" overlap of lunar eclipses with Jewish holidays is not "one-in-tens-of-thousands(!)" but almost one-to-one. Because the Jewish High Holy Days are defined as starting on the full moon - the exact time when lunar eclipses occur. Also, lunar eclipses always happen near the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when the moon's orbit is most closely aligned with the Earth-Sun plane. Hence, of course clusters of full lunar eclipses will line up with those two holidays. It is not "coincidence" or a "sign" but rather a matter of deliberate design… exploited by these "blood moon" predators, preying on the gullible.

The good news? This will pass. Alas, it will be replaced by the next nonsense, then the next. Till we persuade our neighbors to stop hating tomorrow.

== Science Miscellany ==

University of Washington (UW) graduate Thomas Larson is developing a lens that will turn any smartphone or tablet computer into a handheld microscope that magnifies by 150 times.

Ten ways 3D printing could change space exploration.

Wow. A supernova that just happened to be magnified by a gravitational lens of an intervening galaxy.

Fascinating. We assumed all brain neurons needed uniform sheaths of myelin to perform well. Apparently not!

Ancient shrimp had a cardiovascular system 520 millions years ago, earlier than any other known creature. The fossil dates back to a period when the "Cambrian Explosion" was taking off. Possibly the one time aliens DID meddle with our planet… by flushing a toilet here?

Interesting question: Could playfulness be embedded in the universe?

Fascinating news about the importance of the Y Chromosome. Huh.  Maybe males aren't about to go away, after all.  Sorry about that.