So over at one of those super reliable (sarcasm alert) British newspapers they have a story claiming that by making cosmological observations we may have shortened the length of the universe. I very much hope this is just bad science reporting and some physicist out there can tell me what reasonable proposal the telegraph totally butchered since the claim as stated is obviously complete bullshit, even to someone like me who left physics after their sophomore year to do mathematics.

The proposed reason is that by observing the universe we would cause it’s quantum mechanical superposition to collapse and theoretically shorten the expected lifetime of the universe. The analogy is to the (documented and uncontroversial) behavior of elementary particles whose position is repeatedly observed. By collapsing a particle repeatedly into the position basis one reduces the expected distance from it’s starting point after some fixed period of time compared to measuring it once at the end of the interval. Understood naively at this analogical level the application to the universe’s duration seems to make sense but physics isn’t part of the humanities and these analogies are merely imperfect ways of understanding the technical theories not grounds on which to base conclusions.

For starters, as the article does mention, the only way for this argument to even get off the ground is to assume that collapse is real (it’s not an artifact of our observational position as in many-worlds/many-minds type theories) and that it is caused by some aspect of conscious observation. While such theories are popular among those who want to read in support for their spiritual beliefs into quantum mechanics this interpretation of quantum mechanics only a small number of physicists (like Penrose) seem to view this as a plausible account and it’s only slightly more popular among philosophers.

Now while I wouldn’t go so far as to claim this interpretation was likely or even a strong contender I do think it deserves more attention than it is given¹. However, even granting this interpretation we still can’t support the results claimed in the article. In particular we have experimental evidence (double slit experiments) that it isn’t whether or not we actually draw the conclusions about some quantum mechanical system that matters, only whether we become entangled with it. Simplified this says that merely interacting (even indirectly) with an object is enough to collapse it’s wave function. But whether or not we actually built telescopes the radiation from remote events would still interact with us and our enviornment. In short even under the most generous interpretation of quantum mechanics our choice to observe these cosmological events wouldn’t make any difference.

Supposedly a Chinese submarine snuck up on one of our aircraft carriers in the middle of a military exercise. However, if this was really true why wouldn’t we pretend we knew about it and did nothing? After all we wouldn’t want to signal to China that our sensors weren’t any better. On the other hand if we had detected it what would we have done about it? Surely we weren’t going to sink the Chinese submarine but we might very well want to pretend that we didn’t see it.

Then again pride plays into it on our side just as it does theres and for the conspiracy theorists out there this is a wonderful ploy to increase support for spending on new weapons systems or sonar tests (I wonder if they were using the whale killing sonar at the time). In short this sort of story, without much more background information, tells us absolutely nothing even if it is kinda amusing.

Hmm, it appears that I’ve been having some issues with Akismet catching valid comments as spam. I can’t find any option to send me an email whenever I get a spam comment so the best I can do for now is turn off the option to discard spam comments after 15 days and actually look at the supposed spam more frequently.

If anyone has advice on a more flexible anti-spam plugin than akismet that is as effective and easy to use I’d love to hear it.

Anyway I apologize if you submitted a comment and it was deleted. It shouldn’t happen again.

So California assemblyman John Benoit announced legislation today that would set up numerical limits for the amount of illegal drugs (I believe schedule 1 substances excluding marijuana¹) one could have in your blood stream and legally drive similar to the .08 BAC limit for alcohol. Apparently the lack of such specific limits is making it difficult to prosecute inebriated drivers (presumably because they must convince the jury of they reached some subjective level of impairment). This is a good reasonable idea that would likely save lives

But of course a proposal as sane and reasonable as this was too good to be true. Benoit has now said (same article) that he is seriously considering making this a zero tolerance law. Yup, that’s right apparently demonstrating our moral outrage that people are taking illicit substances is more important than saving lives on our highways.

As we all know from drug testing in athletes drugs can be detected in your bloodstream long after the individual in question has sobered up. Thus if you are a drug user the net effect of such a zero tolerance law would be to decrease the relative penalty for driving while inebriated. If you know that even if you wait till the next morning to drive the police could still throw you in jail because of the residual drugs in your bloodstream then why bother waiting? We’ve already (unreasonably in my opinion) expressed our moral disapproval of drugs by making them illegal but it’s criminally stupid to put our moral outrage over people’s lives. Not to mention the perfectly sober people who partied the night before who will end up in jail under such a program.

Of course if groups like Mother’s Against Drunk Driving are really about saving lives and improving highway safety I expect them to come out strongly against bills like this one. I On the other hand if they are about revenge and getting even with that type of person they will probably support this kind of zero-tolerance legislation. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is more likely.

I don’t know enough about Pakistan to have an educated opinion on Musharraf’s decision to toss out the supreme court justices. Maybe this is an awful selfish decision that puts Musharraf’s interests above that of Pakistan. Maybe it is tough choice based on the realization that too much democracy would take the country in the wrong direction. I have no real clue. Frankly I’m sorta surprised that a government that seized power in a coup has allowed as many independent institutions as it has.

However, I find the assumption made by every US media source and public speaker that lack of democracy is ipso facto a violation of human rights or at least a bad thing to be totally fallacious. A quick look at the history of democracy will show that democracies have inflicted a great many injustices and often failed to bring about the improvements in individual welfare and protection from violence that we desire. In fact the economist magazine actually had a plausible analysis suggesting that democratic elections in Africa actually correlated with poor outcomes.

Democratic (or more accurately republican) government requires a great many prerequisites to successfully function. Not only does there need to be a strong civil service tradition in place to allow the government to function properly without strong top down control (including resisting attempts to corrupt future elections) but also a populace that is sufficiently educated to make reasonable decisions. Whether or not these conditions have been sufficiently met in any particular place to make democracy preferable to the other options is a very complex question that shouldn’t just be brushed under the rug with ra ra democracy rhetoric.

I woke up this morning to an NPR discussion with Gary Wills about his op-ed in the LA Times today claiming that abortion is not a religious issue and despite having the sort of calm measured voice that makes you want to believe he is being reasonable the arguments Wills made were so bad it was almost physically painful. True most of the callers to the show were even worse but this guy is being held up as if he made an important serious argument while in reality he is making the same kind of illogical, incoherent partisan emotional appeal that he thinks he is criticizing others for doing. Of course it’s hard to remember what exactly he said on the show but ‘thankfully’ his op-ed is just as incoherent.

Before we even examine what Wills says it’s easy to see that his conclusion couldn’t possibly be true. If you accept a religious account of morality as every major religion does then all moral questions are religious questions. Now I dispute the idea that god could possibly be responsibly for morality¹ but short of throwing out traditional monotheism you’re stuck with the conclusion that abortion is a religious matter. A slightly more defensible claim that Wills could have made is that abortion is not a scriptural matter but this is only better in the sense that the entirety of modern religious moral teaching lacks scriptural justification² and it wouldn’t give him the conclusion he wants (religion should stay out of the abortion debate). So keeping this in mind let’s see what he has to say.

It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

For starters no one believes that all forms of killing deserve to be punished equally. Evangelicals might reasonably think that falsely believing a fetus wasn’t a person was a mitigating factor in their crime. Arguably it wouldn’t even be murder since they would be lacking the relevant intent to take a human life. Ultimately though at best he has shown that some evangelicals have compromised between the pull of religious teaching and mainstream social belief in an inconsistent way. It is of no relevance to the question of whether abortion is a religious question.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past.

Uhh so? They didn’t used to consider the murder of infidels to be morally wrong either. Does this show murder isn’t a religious issue?

The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments — or anywhere in Jewish Scripture.

As I’ve already observed if we insisted that only things with clear cut scriptural support counted as religious we would have to throw out almost all the teachings of every modern religion. The dirty secret of modern religious practice is that we decide what teachings we want to believe in and then search for things that support that view in our holy books. This is a compelling argument that religion is an absurd internally incoherent practice but it is misleading to raise a general failure of religion as if it were of specific relevance to abortion. In any case it brings us no closer to the claim that abortion is not a religious issue since obviously not every matter of religious importance is addressed in scripture.

Much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception — that it is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for defending or condemning abortion. Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.

Gahh, huh? So the question of whether a soul is implanted in a just conceived fetus isn’t a religious question? People who would say yes wouldn’t be making theological arguments? This doesn’t make any sense. As far as the pope this sounds like yet another time people take the complex technical statements that characterize catholic theology and confuse them with their natural language notions. Besides, the idea that there is some bright line division between natural law and religious fact is just flat out wrong. Whether christ rose from the dead is clearly a matter of religion and theology but whether or not any human body ever ceased pumping blood for 3 days before starting to function again is clearly a scientific one and yet one can’t be true without the other (hence the reason to believe they are both false).

If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to reason and science, the realm of Enlightened religion. But that is just what evangelicals want to avoid. Who are the relevant experts here? They are philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear. The experts have only secular expertise, not religious conviction. They, admittedly, do not give one answer — they differ among themselves, they are tentative, they qualify. They do not have the certitude that the religious right accepts as the sign of truth.

Huh? Wait is he really arguing because the experts disagree there isn’t actually a clear cut answer? The argument here is so bad I can’t even guess what he is trying to say. I mean I could create a religion tomorow that says right out in it’s holy book, ‘And on the third day god said abortion was immoral,’ and no failure of scientists and philosophers to agree with me could change the fact that my religion said abortion was immoral. I mean short of straight out arguing that religious belief is unscientific and should be abandoned this point has no grip whatsoever.

So evangelicals take shortcuts. They pin everything on being pro-life. But one cannot be indiscriminately pro-life. …. And if one were consistently pro-life, one would have to show moral respect for paramecia, insects, tissue excised during a medical operation, cancer cells, asparagus and so on. …. Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. …. The universal mandate to preserve “human life” makes no sense. My hair is human life — it is not canine hair, and it is living. It grows.

God this guy is a fucking idiot. When people talk about “human life” they don’t mean any living human cells they mean the life of a human being. Now of course scientifically this term turns out to be imprecise and kinda meaningless but the central thesis of most religions is that humans poses a unique indivisible soul the presence of which is what they mean by human life. If pro-lifers religious beliefs are true they have a perfectly consistent position.

Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

According to most pro-life religious beliefs, yes. So what. God kills lots of people. True the belief that it is wrong for us to intervene and cause someone to die but not for god to kill them is absurd but it is another general problem with religious doctrine nothing specific to abortion.

The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain? Aquinas said that the fetus did not become a person until God infused the intellectual soul. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.

Why is that the question? Why should I give a fuck what Aquinas said? The question is whether it is immoral to abort fetuses not whether they can think, do arithmetic or play snood. Animals can think and there are plenty of animals seemingly as intellectually capable as a newborn human. The idea that there is a simple rule that killing is always wrong and that we just need to decide when an abortion is killing is the essential fallacy of the abortion debate. Killing isn’t essentially wrong it’s the harmful effects it causes like grieving relatives and the fear that someone might kill you that make it wrong. Thus birth is a nearly perfect psychologically salient boundary at which to draw the line at which we will no longer accept killing but this is way off the topic supposedly at issue.

It is not enough to say that whatever the woman wants should go. She has a responsibility to consider whether and when she may have a child inside her, not just a fetus. ….. Given these uncertainties, who is to make the individual decision to have an abortion? Religious leaders? They have no special authority in the matter, which is not subject to theological norms or guidance. The state? Its authority is given by the people it represents, and the people are divided on this. Doctors? They too differ. The woman is the one closest to the decision.

Gahh, there is no natural kind ‘child’ distinct from ‘fetus’ they are just names we choose to apply to stages of development based on our moral classification of them. But ignoring this is he really arguing that because the woman is the most emotional about the issue the most caught up in the events of her life she is the best one to make this decision?

Let’s try this argument elsewhere. Why not say that the decision on whether or not to kill your husband for his money is best made by the woman in question because she is the one closest to it? That’s absurd. In general we recognize that social and moral principles are best formulated by experts given time to deliberate and think. The reason that it should be legal to have an abortion is because on reflection the best arguments show that it is a net societal benefit not because it would be unacceptable for others to step in and stop them if they were doing something that inflicted massive societal harm.

Anyway if you want to argue that abortion should be legal and morally acceptable that’s fine but it really bugs me when someone like this uses laughably absurd arguments to try to pretend they aren’t taking a position on the issue just pointing out that others don’t have standing to really comment. Can there be better evidence that most people aren’t interested in logic but in feel good group affiliation than the fact that a total piece of crap like this piece was published as if it was a reasonable commentary on the morals of abortion?

I just ran across this interesting article on slashdot describing a project to create 3D models of famous landmarks (Tower of Liberty, Notre Dame Cathedral) by algorithmically combining photos posted on flikr. Apart from the technical coolness of the project what struck me about the article was their long term goal of creating full 3D reconstructions of cities by combining the information from billions of online photographs. This project is a perfect illustration of how absurd opposition to projects like google’s street view truly is.

While it may have been intellectually obvious before this sort of project really drives home the fact that increasing computational power and algorithmic advances in computer vision negate the need for any coordinated database. So long as their are enough pictures out there somewhere the right algorithm can sow them back together and extract whatever information you want out of them. Right now the best we might be able to hope for is a fancy version of google’s street view but the inevitable increase in the amount of online content (webcams, automated picture taking etc..) and the inexorable progress of the computer industry means that eventually we will be able to figure out who you are sleeping with¹, where you buy your groceries and even reveal certain health problems.

There is no way around it. Computational advances will eliminate obscurity. The only real question is whether we implement ultimately ineffective laws about ‘privacy’ that will give large organizations with massive computing power an informational advantage until computational power catches up. Anyway I’m repeating myself some I’m going to stop now.

I’m frequently frustrated by the silly imprecise concerns people have about ‘privacy’, particularly in relation to technology. Not only do most people who express concern about this issue have any clear theory about why a loss of privacy would be a bad thing they don’t even bother to distinguish the concept of privacy from other related concepts like obscurity. Ironically while many people who claim to be worried about privacy would, if pressed, cite some Orwellian concern about the government or corporations using information about to control what we can say few people seem to be upset at the governments continuing attempts to do just that. While I know that in a country where a sizeable fraction of the populace is convinced we need laws to protect us from certain combinations of sounds rational consideration is unlikely to ever make a difference it’s still a fun game to play so I’ll take a look at the recently proposed ‘Do Not Track’ list.

Now I agree with Mr. Harper over at The Technology Liberation Front (TLF) when he observes that a ‘Do Not Track’ list isn’t really analogous to the ‘Do Not Call’ list. Targeted advertising is a practice which increases the efficiency of the voluntary exchange of your time/eyeballs for web content while telemarketing is a practice with a significant externality (your time/annoyance) that isn’t paid for by the advertiser. In short targeted advertising makes us better off while telemarketing makes us worse off.

I’m slightly sympathetic to the concern that some people have about advertising companies like doubleclick/google tracking their visits to third party websites. However, despite the ridiculous claim that because mozilla developers get advertising revenue (from google for the default search box) they would never do anything about this problem their are a fuckton of privacy and anonymity extensions for people to use. If people don’t even care enough to go install a browser extension or to convince the firefox people to include such a feature by default (like the popup blocker) then the intrinsic cost of the legislation outweighs these minor benefits. Worse, ignorant of the benefits they get from the practice many people are likely to sign up as the result of scary sound bites about “being watched.”

While I think some of the more extreme worries presented over at the TLF are unrealistic I do think the concept of a ‘Do Not Track’ list raises free speech concerns. While I think it’s surely within the scope of congressional power to require corporations to have privacy policies and abide by them or to impose liability for data breaches requiring someone to delete or avoid recording freely given information is more troublesome. Surely the government could not pass a law preventing any unauthorized individual from retaining financial data on members of congress, that would bar any journalistic inquiry into fraud charges against congressmen but you might think a rule that applied only to normal buisness records avoided these problems. However, I think the recent revelations about who is editing wikipedia, e.g., congressional staffers editting their patron’s page, are a clear example of how user tracking data can be necessary to speak on matters of public concern.

More generally the first ammendment, if it is to have any force, must be read to protect the creation of notes and collection of data. Hell, the creation of a note is itself an act of speech. Simply because you might have lots and lots of data now as a result of the information revolution can’t change that. If I as a blogger have first ammendment protection for announcing that so-and-so visited my blog or that someone with cookie blah-blah-blah did so it’s hard to see how I couldn’t also have first ammendment protection for conveying that information in bulk to someone like google.

Now I admit that the supreme court’s analysis of this issue might be significantly different. I do tend to be a bit of a free speech absolutist. However, regardless of legality I think it’s damn important for us to retain the right to record what happens to us or to objects we control and analyze or pass on that information. If that means people have to go to a bit of trouble to remain anonymous that’s a small price to pay for information freedom. Ultimately technology will erase the obscurity we’ve enjoyed for the last 100 years or so since we moved into cities the only question is do we get democratic access to the analyzed data and the right to use the same tools to monitor the government they use against use or do we adopt a hierarchical model where the government knows everything and the rest of us are barred from accumulating information in databases.

It’s looking more and more likely that we will see genetically engineered super humans born before we die. I’m tempted to say it’s a great time to be alive but in retrospect I imagine this will be seen as an awful time to be alive (those poor sods who were born just slightly too early to be genetically engineered)

So I’ve long been disgusted by the socially approval of complaints about models being too skinny and demands that ‘real’ women, i.e., less skinny women, be depicted in the media. I’ve already skewered most of the arguments elsewhere but the long and short of it is that the people who complain about skinny models aren’t demanding we show more ugly people on TV. Rather they are just complaining about which features are considered beautiful¹.

Sure, often these views are voiced as mostly meaningless gripes the same way men might gripe that it should be illegal for women to prefer the guy with the fancier car, full head of hair etc… So long as these complaints are taken no more seriously than this they are a harmless way to express frustration and worry about one’s sexual desirability. However, some speakers take these complaints quite seriously and that amounts to an (unconsciously) selfish ploy to get ahead by denigrating the competition. After all some people will always be more beautiful than others so at best they are demanding we change the standards to put themselves closer to the top. In men we recognize the analogous unpleasant behavior (dismissing every guy who is popular with the ladies as an asshole or sissy) isn’t praiseworthy and we should do the same in women².

This is simple human psychology. We all (men and women) resent those we fear are more attractive/more successful than us and we look for ways to bring them down so we don’t feel so bad about ourselves. It would thus be unfair to assign more than a little blame to the men and women who look for excuses to dismiss their potential competitors. They are just groping for ways to feel better about themselves. The true culprit here is society which doesn’t call out this behavior for what it is³.

Still, one might have thought that this is just a zero sum game. Some body type will be regarded as most appealing and those women will be the winners and others the losers. But maybe not if the (still speculative) research discussed on the freakonomics blog turns out to be true.

Finally (and more speculatively), women’s perceptions of an ‘ideal’ female body are larger than men’s perceptions of the ‘ideal’ male body, and individuals with larger ‘ideal’ body images are significantly more likely to be obese.

As an a priori matter this certainly seems a plausible result. People who view their body type as just a little overweight might be less motivated to do something about it than those who view theirs as significantly overweight. Moreover, given what we are discovering about the effect of gut bacteria on obesity it’s quite plausible that becoming a little overweight puts you at greater risk of becoming even further overweight. Since the societal harms from obesity dwarf those from anorexia it might be a health harm to encourage the adoption of a less skinny ideal form (noting that the form found most attractive by men isn’t actually unhealthily skinny, e.g., Pamela Anderson holds the record for being a playboy centerfold the most times).

Of course what would be most desirable is to do something about the stress and self-pity that mating expectations inflict on us. While society tells men they aren’t supposed to complain about it this is a problem faced equally by both sexes. If you could get most dating aged boys to be honest you would find just as much angst about having to ask girls out, being expected to act confident and suave when kissing girls as depicted in the media, not looking weak or unmanish, etc.. as girls have about their bodies. Now I realize that any women reading this are likely to be skeptical that such silly little things could possibly be as stressful as the body image propaganda they are exposed to but just step back for a second and think of how silly it must seem to men to see all these extremely hot girls who can crook their finger and sleep with any guy they want fretting about a few pounds the guys don’t even notice. Looking at it from the perspective of the gender trying to be impressed all heterosexual fretting about attractiveness seems absurd and too silly to possibly warrant the angst it causes.

This, however, is as hard a problem as they come. Worrying about our sexual attractiveness is an essential evolutionary strategy. One can find examples of cultures who put less emphasis on slenderness or machoness but you can’t find any society where both sexes didn’t compete over and fret about attractiveness. I actually have much greater hopes for solving this problem for women in the relatively near future than I do for men. When true VR becomes possible anyone will be able to look like anything they want but the sort of things men worry about, status, machoness, confidence, accouterments of success seem much more difficult to equalize. Ultimately I don’t think that problem is solvable short of massive genetic engineering or powerful psychoactive drug regimens. One day perhaps but probably in the distant future.