Happy birthday, good old Ben...

A Pause to Honor Old Ben...

I would normally leave a provocative post like the last one at top position for a few days, to generate discussion. But something else merits timely posting.

Today is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin -- my 18th Century hero. (I have a few other heroes. But they are spread pretty thin.) In fact, we named our first born after him, even though “Benjamin” is supposed to be reserved for your last born.

This is a clear case where one death in childhood would have profoundly altered human history. I cannot think of a single person who was more important. If John Locke was godfather of the pragmatic-modernist Enlightenment, then Franklin was its dad and mentor, meddling and training most of those who set out to transform theory into practice, turning it into a vigorous Grand Experiment.

Moreover, he proved that martyrdom is, at best, a lesser beneficence. Far better to change the world and elevate everyone... while having a really good time! Take a minute to appreciate this fellow. How lucky we were to have him... and how unlucky that his kind were so rare -- or readily squelched -- during the millennia that came before. Today, his potential may reside in some poor Bengali slum kid, or a million other flickering flames, across the globe. People who would be burnt alive in any other culture.

We can argue over how best to nurture such flames. But not over whether that should be a fierce dedication, one that all of us should share. Stay burnable. Help others to be.

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*Speaking of polymaths, here are some snippets from the fecund Ray Kurzweil:

---Crouching Tiger, Hidden Robot Astrobiology Magazine Jan. 14, 2006 ** The 2005 Fourth British Computer Society's Annual Prize for Progress towards Machine Intelligence has been won by IFOMIND, a mobile robot system that demonstrates intelligence as it meets a new object in its world. IFOMIND reacts initially in an "instinctive" way to its first perception of an unknown object that it encounters; at first it is...

--- Taiwan breeds green-glowing pigs BBC News Jan. 12, 2006 ** Scientists in Taiwan say they have bred three pigs that glow in the dark. The pigs are transgenic, created by adding genetic material from jellyfish into a normal pig embryo. The scientists will use the transgenic pigs to study human disease. Because the pig's genetic material is green, it is easy to spot. So if, for instance, some of its...

--- Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, "they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test," in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex...

--- A "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops, is being built 1000 kilometers from the North Pole by the Norwegian government to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity...

--- Dogs do as well as state-of-the-art screening tests at sniffing out people with lung or breast cancer. The research raises the possibility that trained dogs could detect cancers even earlier and might some day supplement or even replace mammograms and CT scans in the laboratory. The dogs correctly detected 99% of the lung cancer samples, and...

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* Some of you have taken to sending me items on the side. That’s fine. But you know I will share the choice bits here, and you could, as well. I am assuming you want them posted at the topmost level and/or you don’t want your names mentioned. Fine.

One of you wrote in about OS Card’s recent missive on Intelligent Design. I may comment on that one soon. First, some miscellany...

*Another of you offered this startlingly cogent (though possibly offensive) political jpeg. It oversimplifies, but lays bare the staggeringly unprecedented levels of hypocrisy. http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/M/h/bush_bj.jpg

*And finally, someone wrote in with this gem: “The national leaders of campus conservatives of that era included many of today's prominent Republican leaders (Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed were all national leaders of College Republicans). It is almost ... creepy ... what an incestuous little group they were -- and are. They were outcasts and they came of age with a collective chip on their shoulders, seething at their mainstream peers (who were probably having a lot more fun than they were). Their views were shockingly extreme and they have spent their lives seeking the power to have their world view prevail.”

I never thought of it that way, before. All those frustrated and goggle-eyed campus rightwing geeks, who could never get a date... are now in charge of the world’s only superpower. No wonder they are so busy not only getting even with all the ex-hippies... but also sticking it to the suave “normal” republicans! This may explain the dramatic and diametric veer away from old-style GOP isolationism into a level of utopian international adventurism that would make John F. Kennedy look positively prudent! In fact, the parallels with JFK are vastly closer than any comparison with, say, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Ah... Alcibiades...