The Singularity

People who know me know that I consider myself a Singularitarian.  I was first turned on to the idea by Ray Kurzweil, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, and later, in The Singularity is Near.

I came across this link that does a pretty good job summarizing the idea, and also presents a pretty good reason to try to get there as soon as possible:
Staring into the Singularity 1.2.5

I have had it. I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships, torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger. I have had it with a planetary death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. I have had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality. None of this is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer necessary to look nervously away, repeating the mantra: "I can't solve all the problems of the world." We can. We can end this.

This reminds me of Dr Aubrey de Grey's plea for everyone to take action now to extend human life.  The Methuselah Foundation has more info about this. 

MPrize-Why Aging?

Because saving lives is the most valuable thing anyone can spend their time doing, and since over 100,000 people die every single day of causes that young people essentially never die of, you'll save more lives by helping to cure aging than in any other way.

It's only a matter of time. Start reading your biology, and make sure you live another 25 years.

Sexual Deception

Is this the effect of the western world on Islam? 

European Muslims resort to virginity ploys - Yahoo! News

Hymen repair, fake virginity certificates and other deceptions, said to be commonplace in some Muslim countries, are practiced in France and elsewhere in Europe, where Muslim girls are more emancipated but still live under rigid codes of family honor.

I guess the true test will be if these women recommend to their daughters that they get the procedure, or if they hold their daughters to looser standards.  This reminds me of how the hippy generation dealt with explaining sex to their children... there seems to be a large number of parents who didn't hold expectations any higher for their children than they conformed to, but also a large segment that continues to preach abstinance until marriage, even if that's not what they themselves did. 

Will these Islamic women loosen their standards, and assimilate into western culture?  Or will they continue to pretend that the old ways are best?  As the world Muslim population is growing more than any other, our future will depends on it. 

Global Cooling

Now that global warming is a fact, with the recent report dismissing the idea that the current rising temperature is part of Earth's natural cycle, it's now OK for scientists to speak out loud about their crazy sci-fi ways of cooling the planet. 

How to Cool a Planet (Maybe) - New York Times

In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

I'm sort of curious what the skeptics are saying about the recent report.  I tried to find some web sites that debunked some of the claims, but I'm not very good at Googling.  I found plenty of sites that attempt to debunk global warming, but I didn't see any that took into account the latest report. 

Artificial Meat

The future gets closer, again. 

Wired News: Test Tube Meat Nears Dinner Table

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.

Would it be weird to eat a burger that you knew was not grown on a cow?  Would vegetarians start to eat meat again en masse?  I have a few vegetarian friends who aren't really opposed to killing the animals; they are most concerned with the health benefits of eating a vegetarian diet.  But then, what if they could genetically modify the meat to have more omega-3 than omega-6 (like fish)?  Asimov and other sci-fi authors predicted this kind of thing years ago, although for them food was made out of algea, not artificial meat. 

Double Your Vitamin D Intake

This should prove healthy:

NPR : Research Suggests Increasing Vitamin D Exposure

In some fracture and bone health studies, patients see benefits with supplements of 800 international units of vitamin D. This is double the amount currently recommended by the government-sponsored Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Goodman claim that the "Daily Recommended Dose" is what the FDA determined was necessary for human to live an averagely healthy life - not what was the optimal amount we can use to be as healthy as possible. 

Perhaps this research will open the door to more vitamins getting an increase in the DRD. 

America: The Next 3rd World Country?

A few things have made me recently question America's future.

First: a national report yesterday found that 3 out of 10 (for those that did not graduate, that's nearly a third!) of students drop out of high school! In Detroit, the graduation rate is almost as low as 20% of students. Overall graduation rate for minorities: Native Americans: 50%, Blacks: 50%, Hispanics: 55%.

Second: Our government is increasingly corrupt. Not just congress, but also White House aids.

Third: Our preventable disease rate is rising. Not just measles, but we are failing to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS, and experts seem to think it's only a matter of time before we all contract bird flu.

These things, combined with our growing dependence on unstable foreign energy supplies, rising pollution rates, soon to be rising sea levels (and the subsequent problems with water supplies and coastal cities under water) lead me to one conclusion: America will steadily descend into Third World status.

What are the hallmarks of a Third World country? Uneducated masses, no respect for the Rule of Law, and ongoing public health epidemics with diseases that are completely curable. I think we should continue doing what we're doing, and it won't be long until we're all being gang raped.

Early Christian Writings and Catholic suppression

I've been involved in some discussions lately with people who don't think there was controversy in the early Christian church over what we are taught today is religious truth.

One of the arguments seemed to deny the possibility that the New Testament that we have today evolved from earlier works and was actively edited, cutting out books that strayed from official doctrine. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com talks about the Q document (the not-extant book of Jesus' sayings, which is claimed to form, along with Mark, a common basis for Matthew and Luke), and also has discussions of many other manuscripts (like the Gospel of the Egyptians), many which might have been heretical at the time. Here's an argument against the Q source, which brings up an interesting point or two:

No-one had ever heard of Q
No ancient author appears to have been aware of the existence of Q. One will search in vain for a single reference to it in ancient literature. For a while it was thought that 'the logia' to which Papias referred might be Q. Indeed, this was one of the planks on which the Q hypothesis rested in the nineteenth century. But no reputable scholar now believes this.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. I've also encountered arguments that the Council of Nicea was basically affirming in the Nicene Creed something Christians believed anyway. However, there are several examples of variant strains of Christianity that defy this logic. For example, in the middle second century, a form of Christianity sprang up known as Marcionism. Marcionism saw the Bible as being from two distinct gods - the wrathful, angry god of the old testament, and the loving and merciful god of the new testament. Marcion was excommunicated from the Church of Rome around 144 AD, and his religion is described as the Roman Catholic Church's greatest enemy.

Another example, of course, is the group known as the Gnostic Christians. This group was in decline by the time of the Council of Nicea, but is still in existence in various forms today.

While neither of these groups were big at the time of the Nicene Council, there was a group led by Arius which disputed the unity of God the Father and Jesus - in effect the widely held doctrine of the Trinity of today's Christian Church. The vote was not close, but any chance this view had of catching on was seriously undermined, even if the controversy lasted another hundred years.

I haven't found any sources that indicate the early Church was involved in hunting down these groups and burning their literature, as common wisdom seems to suggest, but it's hardly deniable that if your doctrine is denounced by the legal, dominant religion, it doesn't have much chance. So I don't find it unbelievable that the early Church might have suppressed a relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus.

Medical Reporting by the Media

Interesting story.  I've noticed some of the issues they bring up.  Political stories have similar problems - a candidate can read millions by stating something false, but the correction will only read a few percent of the original audience. 

Media Omit Basic Facts in Medical Reports - Yahoo! News

# Only 2 of 175 stories about unpublished studies noted that the study was unpublished.
# One-third of the articles failed to mention how many participants were in a study [studies with only a few test subjects are sometimes later refuted by larger studies].
# 40 percent of the reports did not quantify the main result of the research.
# Just one out of 17 news reports on animal studies noted that results might not apply to humans.

Is this why we think a cure for cancer is around the corner? 

Free Speech?

Tamara Hoover, an art teacher in Austin, Texas is about to be fired over some topless photos her partner posted on Flickr.com.

She's got a myspace page, and you can also see some of the other photos of her still up on Flickr (I believe the topless ones have been removed).  (Ooh, I just found a video too.)

Hoover is defending this as a first amendment issue.  From her myspace page:

The school is saying that i was on a pornographic
website
deemed me ineffective


1. The website is artistic photogrphy and very good
at that.
2. I never told kids to "go see me" at the website.
3. The website is not mine and I have no control over
what the photographer posts, nor do i know what she
is going to post
4. The website is not pornographic.
5. I have been recognized by the board year after year (2 weeks before may 19 board recognized me again) for outstanding
achievments as an art teacher..YET I am supposedly ineffective.

This guy seems to think it's the teacher who turned her in we should be worried about. 

I think this puts conservatives in a tough spot.  On the one hand, you've got your moral issues to worry about: there's nudity, there are students, and there's homosexuality.  On the other hand, it seems like this was an art teacher doing arty things, which should be perfectly protected by our constitution, and it appears none of her pictures are any worse than the ones shown to art students in high school anyway, or, for that matter, in any museum or public sculpture. 

I think this is one more example of the backwards society we live in.  Video games and movies can be as violent as they wish to be, but as soon as nudity or sexuality intrudes, they are censored.  Shouldn't we be more interested in eliminating gratuitous felony activity from our public artwork than perfectly natural bodies? 

Online Revenge II

More Revenge Sites

Apparently I'm not the only one who noticed that people are now exacting their revenge online. Avant Game noticed as well, and even coined a term for it: Chinavenging!

Online Revenge

Revenge Posts

I've come across a couple of sites devoted to exacting revenge on someone who has victimized the author in some way.

How NOT to steal a Sidekick
The Broken Laptop I Sold On Ebay

In the second case, at least, the police (in Briton) are investigating the victim (of the laptop fraud) for hate speech.

I'm sure there are many other posts like this, but I think it's an interesting (albeit with high potential of backfire) way to air your grievances. Wheras it might be smarter to go to the police and try to get your money back, these two cases seem to be more about embarrassing the other party.

I wonder how much of this counts as libel.

The Power of Prayer

Why won't God heal amputees?

I found this on The Dilbert Blog: http://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/

I think it has some strong points, and I can't find many places where I see holes in the logic. I think it's at least an interesting question to think about. The site seems a little too bent on proving God through science, though.

I tried to trap someone using some of the arguments I found. It went like this:
"Do you pray?"
"Yes."
"Do you believe what the bible says about the power of prayer?"
"Yes, pretty much."
"So, you believe God answers prayer?"
"Well, I think prayer works similarly to meditation, in that a lot of it's power comes from your mind's ability to do amazing things."
"Doh."

Scott Adams

I've discovered that I enjoy reading The Dilbert Blog even more than Dilbert comic strips. The reason is that even though Adams makes keen and funny observations about cube life, his insights about politics and religious are just as interesting and always make me think.

Take this recent post about Relativity: "When I hear people say that they know God exists because he healed their aunt’s cancer, it sounds to me exactly like 'Rocks are liquid because 5 is greater than 6.'"

Then there's his response to the commentors who are always pointing out exceptions to his rules. His response: coin a new acronym, BOCTAOE, which stands for "But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions," and which he uses any time he makes a generalization which clearly doesn't hold up in all circumstances.

Adams linked to an article in a recent post that pointed out most college students don't know that 50 million people died in WWII. Indeed, I was surprised to see that number when I visited a WWII museum in Paris. Another "fact:" there are more Jewish people than Muslims in the world.

The solution to ignorance, according to the linked article: read more, and watch less TV. Does that include the Daily Show?

Interesting Article About Email

This is an interesting article about email:

The time has come to ditch email

I'm not sure this is practical, but it would be interesting for some big player, with a lot of users, come up with an open standard that is at first available to only the users of their system (gmail, perhaps?), but would catch on like wildfire once people realized it was secure. Of course, is anything secure? A computer in the top 500 might be required now to send out a bunch of emails, but what about in 5 years? And you wouldn't have to have a powerful computer if you used a web email client -- in fact, it would probably be a huge overhead for large email providers like yahoo and gmail. And then there's the fact that nothing will be secure when quantum computers are widespread, so will we have to start from scratch again?

Gay Marriage

A court fight is currently underway in New York over the issue of gay marriage.

Highest Court in New York Confronts Gay Marriage

If the court were to rule in favor of gay marriages, would this be an example of judicial activism, or legislating from the bench? Or would this be an example of the courts protecting a minority group? While I am one who believes that people should be pretty free to do whatever they want, mostly as long as they aren't doing bodily harm to someone else, I'm not sure that marriage is a "right" that people have, and something that the courts should decide is protected for everyone by the constitution. So while the courts deciding that the law is unconstitutional would be pushing society forward, it does seem like this one is still in the domain of the legislature.

Also, doesn't this open the doors to pedophilia and bestiality?