Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2013

Ethical debates of the very near future: species de-extinction

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

Matt Ridley on the soon-to-be-possible reversal of species extinction:

The founders of Revive and Restore aren’t mainstream scientists, but they’re not people to be taken lightly, either. Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan are a husband-and-wife team with a track record of starting unusual but successful organizations — in his case, the Whole Earth Catalog and the Global Business Network; in hers, the consumer-focused startups Direct Medical Knowledge and DNA Direct. They’ve attracted the interest of the pioneering Harvard University DNA sequencing and synthesis expert George Church.

Their argument is that it’s time to start tentatively trying de-extinction and thinking through its ethical and ecological implications. There are already projects under way to revive extinct subspecies like the European aurochs (a type of wild cattle) and the Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo. In the latter case, when the last female (Celia) was killed by a falling tree in 2000, her tissue was cloned. At least one fetus survived to term in a surrogate mother goat, but it died soon after birth.

A full species that’s been extinct for decades like the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) or the passenger pigeon — the last one of which, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo 99 years ago — will be a taller order, since the DNA from long dead specimens is fragmented. Yet Ben Novak, a young researcher working with the ancient-DNA expert Beth Shapiro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has extracted passenger pigeon DNA from the toe pad of a museum specimen and sequenced it. Dr. Church hopes to use one of the newly invented letter-by-letter gene-replacement techniques, such as Talens or Crispr, to transform the genome of a related species called the band-tailed pigeon into that of a passenger pigeon.

“The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Charles Stross linked to this article saying that it’s the second order effects that are going to be more important over time:

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

[. . .]

Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

QotD: “One way to know that you’re doing the right thing”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

Is to look at peoples’ reactions to what you’re doing. If, for example, you decided that you wanted to clean up the MPs’ expenses system and every MP then started howling about how we mere ignorant citizenry aren’t supposed to control them then we’d know that we were on the right track. Similarly, if every criminal in the country (to the extent that this is a different group from MPs) starts to complain about the length of sentences after just and righteous trials then you would at least begin to suspect that you might have created sentences which have a deterrent effect.

Tim Worstall, “One way to know that you’re doing the right thing”, Adam Smith Institute blog, 2013-03-02

A 2% budget cut should not impact day-to-day services

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

In the Washington Times, Gary Johnson looks at the wild claims about what the sequester will do to the services Americans receive from the federal government:

To listen to the parade of Obama administration officials warning of civilization-ending consequences from the measly $85 billion in spending “cuts” sequestration will bring, one can only reach one of two conclusions: Either they are just making stuff up to make the cuts as painful as possible, or the federal budget is so out of control that a mere 2.4 percent reduction in projected spending is more than the system can handle.

Frankly, it is both. Absolutely, in their zeal to make Republicans pay the maximum political price for what is actually both parties’ fault, it is almost comical to watch one Cabinet official after another step up to the microphone and tell us that a 2.4 percent reduction (that isn’t really a reduction) will cause airplanes to fall out of the sky, our national defense to be disabled and our children to starve. That game is among the oldest in Washington. Cut the Park Service budget, and suddenly they can’t find the money to keep the Lincoln Memorial or Yellowstone open.

This sideshow is entertaining, but it misses what may be the most important lesson to be learned from this sequester debacle. While there is certainly a heavy dose of Chicken Little falling-sky rhetoric coming out of the bureaucracy, it is probably true that the rather indiscriminate sequester formula is presenting some challenges for some agencies.

[. . .]

If “cutting” discretionary spending by a lousy 2 or 3 cents on the dollar is enough to create dire consequences (for the sake of argument), imagine what would happen if we tried to reduce that spending by the 30 cents it will take to balance the budget and stop digging ourselves even deeper into unsustainable debt.

Chief Justice McLachlin’s “evolving” view of free speech

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

In the Ottawa Citizen, Karen Selick explains why the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision in the Whatcott case was so surprising:

For 22 years, free-speechers have cherished the hope that another case involving censorship and human rights legislation would come back before Chief Justice McLachlin. That’s because in 1990, before becoming chief justice, she wrote dissenting judgments in two cases, Taylor and Keegstra. Her opinion then was that the censorship sections of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) and the Criminal Code violated the Charter guarantee of freedom of expression, and that the violation was not justified in our free, democratic society. She therefore voted to strike down the censorship clauses as unconstitutional.

Justice McLachlin was outvoted in both Taylor and Keegstra by the narrowest of margins: 4-3. The majority of the 1990 court found both the CHRA and the Criminal Code provisions constitutional. However, Justice McLachlin penned a long and eloquent paean to freedom of expression, recounting its historical value as “an essential precondition of the search for truth,” a promoter of the “marketplace of ideas” and “an end in itself, a value essential to the sort of society we wish to preserve.”

Free-speechers hoped that, given another opportunity to exert her influence among an entirely different panel of SCC judges (she is the only member of the 1990 court still on the bench), she would be able to sway a majority to her 1990 views.

Instead, she herself has apparently abandoned those views, voting with a unanimous court (6-0) in the Whatcott case to uphold the main censorship clause of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code.

March 1, 2013

Ken at Popehat really does attract the most fascinating legal threats

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:50

If your Friday routine is a bit dull, go see what sort of crackpots Ken gets to interact with these days:

Today, I received a legal threat purporting to be from Ken Matherne, owner of the Global Wildlife Center. Using people smarter than I (a large set), I confirmed the email came from the Global Wildlife domain. In the email, Mr. Matherne threatens me with litigation and attempts to insult me. It has to be read to be believed.

    OK – your fun was enough – since your cute story, you have hurt my Foundation, I am divorced over this thing that you think was funny. The dad that OD.

    The University that I supported used state university equipment – this will be a test of how the justice system will work. I gave the same people $150K+ to support your liberal views at least that year. And yes I am a conservative, because I am paying all the taxes!

    I gave you the last one. But, you are still playing with my foundation , so you give me no choice You are fucking with my daughter and I will not put up with that – I will not support the Universities and scholarships I give every year. I have given more than 52 percent to democrats over 10 years – don’t care how liberal your group is or have much dope you smoke & drugs you do – nor witch one of you is screwing who – if y’all are all boyfriends on the side – matters not to me.

    You just gave me a new mission in life – to bring the real truth out!

    And this is not a threat , this is a promise – I will spend the rest of my life investigating you and your partners and associates that slander people and companies, even non- profits . I am hiring a team now to work on you and your team. I want to know how your guys can be so sick to do things like this to children.

The crazy goes high octane as the exchanges continue. Oh, and do read the comments at Popehat where Ken’s readers try to make sense of the original and follow-on messages.

Update, March 6th: Now it’s Techdirt getting the crazy legal stalker treatment from the same person who had Popehat in his sights.

Today is Wednesday. At 12:49am California time this morning (2:49am in Louisiana, where the Global Wildlife Center is based), it appears that Ken Matherne subscribed to our daily email. Three minutes later, he unsubscribed. One minute after that, the general catchall email address that is the “from” in the subscription confirmation email, received a message from Matherne with the following subject line and no message:

    you are saved and wait for me!

Leaving aside the vague notions of religious salvation, we waited. Not for long. At 1:39am our time, we received a “reply” to the unsubscribe notice that just said:

    Get ready!

With anticipation building, we continued to wait (actually, we were all asleep). Eight minutes after that email, we got the following:

    What state are you registered in? And if any of your two companies are affiliated – we should start to proceed. My daughter asked me not to last night. But after you new post — I am coming!

    Law is the Law !

[. . .]

I like how he is emailing us after 2am California time, where we are located, and giving us less than 6 hours to respond. While we are curious how reporting on facts means that we have started “a conspiracy,” and find it even more interesting that he appears to directly be admitting that his intention is merely to tie us up in court, we believe that he probably should have heeded the original advice of his daughter that this was not a productive path to take.

He might also want to look up the definition of what a “threat” is, because saying that he will spend the next 20 years taking us to court is pretty much the definition of a threat.

When I read through the messages both Popehat and Techdirt have received, I can’t help hearing them in my head as if read by Mr. Plinkett.

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:31

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The February update went live this week and there’s lots of discussion about the new content. ArenaNet has been very pro-active about getting new information out and we also have the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Kickstarter promotion: win a day with Chris Kluwe

Filed under: Business, Football, Gaming — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe has been in the news a heck of a lot for any non-quarterback. He’s probably the most newsworthy punter in the NFL in the last 25 years or more. A new Kickstarter initiative is trying to take advantage of Kluwe’s popularity to raise money for their project:

Former Chicago Bears’ linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer has designs on launching something called “Overdog.” According to this interview with Hillenmeyer in Forbes, what Overdog is designed to do is connect athletes that like to play video games to … well … other people that like to play video games.

[. . .]

Before Overdog can launch, Hillenmeyer wants to raise $100,000 for various aspects of the project. In order to do this, they’ve done what pretty much everyone with a project is doing these days. . .started their own Kickstarter to raise money. Like other Kickstarter drives, there are various levels of pledges you can give, with a higher pledge giving you a higher level of recognition, access, whatever. One of the levels you can pledge at … and there are only four spots available at this level … will give you the following:

    The Kluwe Experience. Describing a day with OverDog advisory board member Chris Kluwe any other way would be shortchanging him. One lucky fan will have the chance to receive a punting lesson (in Minneapolis), play some video games (likely World of Warcraft), and soak in the wisdom from the NFL’s most interesting man. Unfortunately, travel is not included but a Forever Subscription is.

Sequester nightmare: “The administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Charles Krauthammer on the differing aims of the President and the congressional Republicans over sequestration:

“The worst-case scenario for us,” a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told The Washington Post, “is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens.”

Think about that. Worst case? That a government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent — and the country survives. That a government now borrowing 35 cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by two cents “and nothing bad really happens.” Oh, the humanity!

A normal citizen might think this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal — the reduction of which, however minuscule, is a national calamity.

Or damn well should be. Otherwise, people might get the idea that we can shrink government, and live on.

Hence the president’s message. If the “sequestration” — automatic spending cuts — goes into effect, the skies will fall. Plane travel jeopardized, carrier groups beached, teachers furloughed.

The administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.

Update: Mark Steyn was a guest on the Hugh Hewitt show the other day to talk about this:

I’m not big on those Mayan guys, but those Mayan guys only hold an apocalypse every few thousand years. Washington now has a Mayan apocalypse every six weeks, whether it’s the fiscal cliff or the debt ceiling, or now the sequestration. And as you say, it’s talking about $44 billion dollars, or about what the United States government borrows, borrows every nine days, every nine days. So in other words, we’ve just spent weeks talking about nine days’ worth of borrowing, which in any eventual deal isn’t actually going to be saved anyway, because the latest deficit reduction bill actually increases the deficit, because that’s just the way Washington works.

[. . .]

Yeah, and you know what’s crazy about this is that let’s pretend that the officials who are speaking on this, the cabinet secretaries who are coming out and telling us that the world will come to an end tomorrow, that the planes are going to be dropping from the skies, that our infants and seniors are going to be dying untended in hospitals, that your shower head is going to be blasting out fecal coliform on you in the morning, that all of this is going to be happening just for his hypothetical $40 billion dollars of so-called entirely phony sequestration cuts, now assuming they’re not just lying to us. They’re basically telling us that nothing can ever be done about Washington spending ever. If $40 billion of hypothetical cuts means that the planes are dropping from the skies, and Obama’s even cancelled the deployment of a carrier to the Gulf, you know, in other words, when the Iranians go nuclear, he’ll be able to say oh, I would have stopped that, but we were all tied up with the sequestration. Sequestration is what allowed the mullahs to go nuclear. If that’s true, nothing can ever be done about anything ever, and Washington might as well just close up and go home.

North Korea’s real inflation rate may have reached 116%

Filed under: Asia, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the Cato@Liberty blog, Steve Hanke looks at North Korea’s offical statistics and makes an educated guess at what they conceal, rather than reveal about the country’s state:

During the past few weeks, North Korea has been the subject of outsized news coverage. The recent peacocking by Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un — from domestic martial law policies to tests of the country’s nuclear weapons capabilities — has successfully distracted the media from North Korea’s continued economic woes. For starters, the country’s plans for agricultural reforms have been deep-sixed, and, to top it off, I estimate that North Korea’s annual inflation rate hit triple digits for 2012: 116%, to be exact.

Unfortunately, the official shroud of secrecy covering North Korea’s official information and statistics remains more or less intact. But, some within North Korea have begun to shed light on this “land of illusions”. For example, a team of “citizen cartographers” helped Google construct its recent Google Maps’ exposition of North Korea’s streets, landmarks, and government facilities. In addition, our friends at DailyNK have successfully been reporting data on black-market exchange rates and the price of rice in North Korea — data which allowed me to conclude that the country experienced an episode of hyperinflation from December 2009 to mid-January 2011.

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