Miscellaneous

8:09 am – Seems that Cord forgot to bring toothpaste. They sell it in the St. Regis, but at a price!

8:17 am – Bacon! And there’s sausage patties too, but bacon is what really excites people.

8:25 am – Am I the only one wearing sneakers?

8:35 – A little chilly here in the conference room.

And – to summarize – I’m not too big on liveblogging.

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Many of your humble Technology Liberation Front contributors will be attending PFF’s annual Aspen Summit next week and we think many of you will too. So, we’ve decided to hold the fourth in our series of Alcohol Liberation Front get-togethers on Tuesday, 8/21, at 9 p.m. at the Sky Bar located at the base of the Aspen Mountain. Like we did last time, we’ll also be recording our contributors (and hopefully some of you) pontificating for our podcast, Tech Policy Weekly. So drop on by and have a drink with your favorite TLF bloggers.

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I normally love John Tierney’s work, but boy is this silly. “Man, what if, like, we’re not real, man. What if we’re just a computer simulation like on the Matrix?” Beyond the dorm-room-bull-session character of the whole premise, the argument doesn’t make any sense:

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

It might be true that at some point we’ll have the computing power to run precise, molecule-by-molecule simulations of the human brain. But that doesn’t really get you where Bostrom wants to take us. What he wants is a molecule-by-molecule simulation of the entire universe, or at the very least of the entire surface of Planet Earth. Human brains don’t exist in isolation. Their development is intimately shaped by their interaction with the real world. To develop a realistic simulation of the brain, you need a realistic simulation of the world the brain interacts with.

And accurately simulating any given system requires a computer system at least as complex as the system being simulated. We’re only able to simulate things like the weather and car crashes because we make assumptions that radically simplify our models. But that, of course, makes the details of their predictions wrong, especially over long time frames. That’s why weather predictions further out than 10 days are worthless. If you’re trying to simulate a long-term process like the evolution of human society, such radical simplifications wouldn’t be acceptable. If virtual Milikan performs his oil-drop experiment, the simulation had better be detailed enough to keep track of individual electrons, or the physicists of your virtual world will be very confused, and the “science” of our virtual world will evolve in a very different direction.

So an accurate simulation of the world would have to be roughly as complex as the world itself. And since any given computer will presumably only be a small part of the world, the maximum complexity of the worlds it can simulate will necessarily be far simpler than the real world the computer occupies. So while I suppose it’s possible we’re being simulated by a computer in a mind-bogglingly more complex universe, the more plausible explanation is that we’re in the “real” world, whatever that means.

Did the New York Times really just print that?

Update: Tom Lee had almost exactly the same reaction. Although he’s obviously cooler than me, as his college students had a dime bag in addition to their copy of The Matrix.

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Well this terribly off-topic, but I just had to share this. The Mattel toy recall is making big news this week and part of the recall includes some toys that include small magnets. Apparently some kids are sticking the magnets in their mouths and swallowing them. Lesson: Magnets + intestines = bad mix. Who knew!

Anyway, one of the toys being recalled is the “Barbie and Tanner” playset which–and I am NOT making this up–lets your child experience the joys of picking up dog poop! You see, Tanner is Barbie’s yellow labrador retriever and all he does is eat and then go poo. You put little brown food pellets in Tanner’s mouth, push his tail down, and then he poops them right out. Tanner is one well-balanced little doggie and his poop is always solid, which is helpful because the Barbie in this set comes with a pooper-scooper to clean up after him!

How do I know all this? Because this damn pooping dog is my 5 year old daughter’s favorite toy! She keeps this dumb dog in her dollhouse with all her dolls and even lets the dog sleep in the bed with Barbie. But now it’s being recalled because these little poo pellets are a hazard to a kid’s health. Honestly, I’m not really concerned with my daughter putting these little pellets in her mouth. Perhaps that’s because she understands that they represent fake dog poop and it would be gross to put them in her mouth!

But my 3 year old son? Well, he’s not quite as sharp as his sister. (Perhaps it’s because of all the lead paint he’s licking off those other Mattel toys!) Moreover, he’s got a little Beavis and Butthead in him and his first response upon seeing the Tanner dog do his duty was to say something to the effect of “Heh-heh, huh-huh…pooooooop!” So God only knows what that kid might do if he ever got his hands on those dog poo pellets.

Regardless, I’m probably gunna have to get rid of that pooping dog, and that’s going to make my daughter utterly hysterical. It’ll be like the final scene out of “Old Yeller.” She’ll be sobbing and uttering lines like, “No Pa, please don’t put Old Tanner down!” And I’ll have to come up with some BS story about Tanner’s time on Earth coming to an end and how he’s going to doggie heaven. I’ll probably have to bury him in a shoebox in the backyard with a formal gravestone before it’s all over. And what makes it all the more insulting is that, as I am going out back to bury the toy dog, I will have to navigate my way through a minefield of actual dog sh*t from our family’s 10 year old lab who poops–not so solidly as Tanner, I might add–just about anywhere and everywhere he can find a patch of living grass. That stupid Tanner toy hasn’t helped me a damn bit when it comes to getting my daughter interested in picking up real doggie doo-doo, which my daughter describes as “just nasty.”

Damn you Tanner. Damn you to Hell.

(P.S. I wrote about other killer toys last December in this essay).

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Ellen Miller got the scoop in an email:

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element has been named Governmentium. Governmentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons . . . .

It continues from there.

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Last week, Congress passed a bill spending $250 million on reconstruction of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota. Over at WashingtonWatch.com, we did some calculating and found that this quarter-billion in spending amounts to about $130,000 per foot.

It’s about a third of the height, but triple the cost-per-foot, of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere.

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I first became aware of the massive statistical infrastructure of the U.S. government because much of its data collections have privacy consequences. The Census Bureau, for example, has turned a simple instruction to count people (“[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.” ) into a large organization with lots and lots of different information products.

Recognize that the process of collecting, compiling, and disseminating information is an economic function. This Federal Register notice on federal statistical practices does so, with some interesting spin:

To operate efficiently and effectively, our democracy relies on the flow of objective, credible statistics to support the decisions of governments, businesses, households, and other organizations. Any loss of trust in the integrity of the Federal statistical system and its products could lessen respondent cooperation with Federal statistical surveys, decrease the quality of statistical system products, and foster uncertainty about the validity of measures our Nation uses to monitor and assess its performance and progress.

Without us, you’d be lost! And if federal statistical agencies just disappeared, that would be true. Statistics are an important tool of government and business.

But . . . is it government’s responsibility to develop and deliver statistics to business? Or is that another dimension of corporate welfare? Here in Washington, there are statistics “user” organizations whose mission is to preserve the flow of data from government to business – to collect another set of goodies free – or, most accurately, at the taxpayers’ expense.

In my former life as a lobbyist/consultant, I represented a very cool satellite remote sensing company called Digital Globe. You’ve probably seen their stuff on Google Maps, and TV networks often use their imagery to illustrate news stories. Given my libertarian predilections, I was painfully aware that this company was in competition with a rather substantial competitor, the U.S. government, and in this area, like so many, the competition was hydra-headed.

If the market for geospatial data weren’t already well occupied by government suppliers, Digital Globe and its many competitors would be producing better information products than are available in the government-dominated market, and the costs of doing so would fall where they should – directly on users.

I’m not asking you to be convinced yet, but just think about having the corporate sector pay its own way for the data and statistics it uses.

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This week’s cavalcade of 700 MHz posts was an interesting opportunity to see and explore the interesting divisions on the issues among TLFers and with our friends in the commentsphere.

Because I have just finished a rejoinder in one, I noticed that a couple of these posts broke out into point-by-point discussions. The response I just wrote to TLF friend Doug Lay stretched to about two pages of text – and I never want to do that again!

Is there some practice we should all engage in to minimize excessively long point-by-point discussions? They are very time consuming, and they may not benefit visitors to the site very much – other than those of us point-by-pointing each other.

True, these are multi-faceted issues, but it might make sense for commenters and TLFers both to focus carefully on the precise thrust of each post, as best we can discern them. Alternatively, when a point-by-point breaks out, we could make the tangents into new posts and let the discussions of each blossom in its own little hothouse.

Ideas?

(A point-by-point response in the comments to all I’ve said here would not – well, yes it would – be funny.)

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