Atomic Nerds

Fashion It So, which has been distracting me thoroughly and hilariously for the last two days and looks to keep right on truckin’ through the weekend until I run out of archive. The thing about pretty much all incarnations of Trek is that it’s like a lasagna of good, bad, and cheesy, and the bad and the cheesy are actually as much a part of the appeal as the good. It’s kind of like a stadium hot dog in that sense. You take your servings of bad with the good because it’s part of the experience, and wouldn’t be the same without it. The people writing this blog are watching Trek for pretty much exactly the same basic reason I am, except vastly more focused on the costuming choices.

25 Minutes of Cave Johnson

So the context for this is the folks at Valve had Cave Johnson’s voice actor record a whole bunch of new lines for a new level creator downloadable content package for Portal 2, so that the lines play more or less at random at the beginning of created levels. That’s actually not really important, nor is having played any Portal game ever or knowing who the hell Cave Johnson is. This is all of those lines stitched together in a 25 minute sequence. The experience of hitting “play” on this is like having a mad scientist CEO who took acting lessons from the William Shatner school of scenery chewing come into your work space and emit a stream of consciousness. It’s the best background to reading my news feeds I have ever experienced. chariots chariots

David Sunflower Seeds now comes with a reclosable zip-top bag, so you don’t have to rip an awkwardly sized hole in it that you optimistically try to crumple closed after you’re done with your feed seed bag for the moment. Stingray, who always has various seed and nut bags in various stages of consumption strewn around his desk because he is actually a parrot, is very excited about this.

There’s really no way to set this up or lead in gently, so I’ll put it bluntly: it’s an emotional robotic ass. Its whole reason for existence is to be a butt that conveys emotions the user can perceive, although I think they have not entirely succeeded in this given that my ass does not vibrate when I’m scared or pulse when I’m happy. Or at least I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I’ve never noticed anyone else’s ass do this either, although I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in cartoons drawn by John Kricfalusi.

If I had to take a guess as to why someone has gone to the effort to create an interactive emotional mechanical ass, I’d speculate that gluteal muscles are a lot easier to simulate mechanically than the tiny muscles in the face responsible for expression, and thus it’s an easier target. This is pretty much just wild speculation, though, as the subtitles explaining the robot ass seem to take it as self-evident that users would want to interact with a buttbot and read its feelings. I still really, really want to read the grant proposal for that, though.

Question as posed by the subtitles: “And second is to raise the argument as to what perceptions will be manifested in the minds of people who communicate with SHIRI”

and answered by Stingray: “I think topping the list will be ‘why am I talking to this ass?'”

There’s really no way to set this up or lead in gently, so I’ll put it bluntly: it’s an emotional robotic ass. Its whole reason for existence is to be a butt that conveys emotions the user can perceive, although I think they have not entirely succeeded in this given that my ass does not vibrate when I’m scared or pulse when I’m happy. Or at least I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I’ve never noticed anyone else’s ass do this either, although I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in cartoons drawn by John Kricfalusi.

If I had to take a guess as to why someone has gone to the effort to create an interactive emotional mechanical ass, I’d speculate that gluteal muscles are a lot easier to simulate mechanically than the tiny muscles in the face responsible for expression, and thus it’s an easier target. This is pretty much just wild speculation, though, as the subtitles explaining the robot ass seem to take it as self-evident that users would want to interact with a buttbot and read its feelings. I still really, really want to read the grant proposal for that, though.

Question as posed by the subtitles: “And second is to raise the argument as to what perceptions will be manifested in the minds of people who communicate with SHIRI”

and answered by Stingray: “I think topping the list will be ‘why am I talking to this ass?'”

So President Obama has gone ahead and come out in support of same-sex marriage.

One would think I’d be pleased about this, since I’m also in favor, but I’m not especially. I AM pleased that it is possible to have a sitting President who is in favor, and view that as positive progress.

You could characterize my overall lack of other forms of pleasedness as personal distaste for Obama, which is probably not entirely untrue, but I note that a lot of same-sex marriage advocates have had pretty much exactly the same reaction as I have: that this is a nakedly opportunistic political calculation in an election year, and not a statement of intent or meaningful support.

Basically, it goes like this: liberals saw him as tepid in his support of gay rights, conservatives saw him as secretly supporting gay marriage no matter what he said, and moderates saw him as a waffler. He had nothing left politically to gain from maintaining a pretense of opposing it, and the political math was better to look like he was taking a firm position of some kind given that the people who’d be legitimately put off by it are mostly lost causes at this point, whereas younger voters who see gay rights as their generation’s civil rights struggle would be very much energized.

Having someone who is secretly in favor of your side of an issue is exactly like having someone who doesn’t support it. Having someone who is now in favor of your issue but supports the states deciding it (as he was careful to qualify) is having someone who supports the status quo. While it’s nice he’s not going to actively roll back progress made, it’s not exactly helpful either. Even to the extent that being publicly out in favor is nice for generating support/enthusiasm, it would have been a hell of a lot more useful BEFORE North Carolina decided to write a ban on even so much as the possibility of civil unions or domestic-partner benefits into its constitution.

Having someone powerful in your corner who’ll do exactly as much to help you as his aides calculate is politically beneficial is not that much of a warm fuzzy feeling.

So President Obama has gone ahead and come out in support of same-sex marriage.

One would think I’d be pleased about this, since I’m also in favor, but I’m not especially. I AM pleased that it is possible to have a sitting President who is in favor, and view that as positive progress.

You could characterize my overall lack of other forms of pleasedness as personal distaste for Obama, which is probably not entirely untrue, but I note that a lot of same-sex marriage advocates have had pretty much exactly the same reaction as I have: that this is a nakedly opportunistic political calculation in an election year, and not a statement of intent or meaningful support.

Basically, it goes like this: liberals saw him as tepid in his support of gay rights, conservatives saw him as secretly supporting gay marriage no matter what he said, and moderates saw him as a waffler. He had nothing left politically to gain from maintaining a pretense of opposing it, and the political math was better to look like he was taking a firm position of some kind given that the people who’d be legitimately put off by it are mostly lost causes at this point, whereas younger voters who see gay rights as their generation’s civil rights struggle would be very much energized.

Having someone who is secretly in favor of your side of an issue is exactly like having someone who doesn’t support it. Having someone who is now in favor of your issue but supports the states deciding it (as he was careful to qualify) is having someone who supports the status quo. While it’s nice he’s not going to actively roll back progress made, it’s not exactly helpful either. Even to the extent that being publicly out in favor is nice for generating support/enthusiasm, it would have been a hell of a lot more useful BEFORE North Carolina decided to write a ban on even so much as the possibility of civil unions or domestic-partner benefits into its constitution.

Having someone powerful in your corner who’ll do exactly as much to help you as his aides calculate is politically beneficial is not that much of a warm fuzzy feeling.

One of the better of several available screeds pointing out that the “People’s Rights” amendment would pretty much exist to give the government the ability to summarily muzzle, sue, or disband any entity larger and more profitable than a garden party that it disapproved of.

I feel others more qualified than I have done a perfectly fine job of presenting the idea that a)This is what it would effectively do, and b)This would be a very bad thing, bad far out of proportion to the ills it’s meant to address.

What I would like to note is on the subject of the entities this particular broad stroke is no doubt aimed at: lobbying groups, PACs, special interest groups, all conglomerations of persons whose business is to bother legislators and the public at large in the name of their particular goal: I am glad that they exist and I wish them continued existence.

There are a large number of issues, policies, and subjects in general that I care about, and I do not have anything like the time or energy to pay attention to all of them all at once. I don’t have the time or energy to pay attention and due diligence to any one them, in fact. I am downright pleased as punch that there exist groups whose paying jobs and reason for existence revolve around professionally caring about things that I do and exerting influence on people who have a direct relationship with these issues.

This system is not without its large and systemic flaws. Groups who represent the interest of majorities wield more force than those who represent minorities; they suffer profoundly from principal-agent problems; they sometimes “represent” me in ways I truly wish they would not; they pursue goals I consider irrelevant or actively counter-productive; they blow issues that are not of particularly critical relevance out of proportion in election cycles; they are a primary contributing agent to how legislation winds up bloated, byzantine, and full of irrelevancies.

There’s also the fact that people I consider my sworn ideological foes have access to exactly the same processes and have their own leviathan lobbying platforms, but I consider this acceptable. My only wish is that they be more self-evidently stupid or hateful more often, not that anyone have the power to make them go away.

But, without the professional issue-obsessers and interest-pushers, my- and every other individual with those various enumerated rights we’re supposedly being protected by such a bill- influence over the actual process of creating policy relevant to various issues we care about dwindles to effectively zero. There’s this blog, which doesn’t stay on a single topic for more than a day or two, and there’s the standard letter to the congresscritter, which the critters mostly don’t read, and that’s about it. The remaining source of influence dwindles to the government and whoever happens to be immediately buddies with the people in it, which takes the fundamental problem of said government having an extraordinarily narrow and blinkered perspective on the country and the world in general and makes their isolation total. (Remember, media corporations would get their rights stripped, too.)

It’s a terrible voice, but it beats the hell out of no voice.

“Bucharest just won the international Hideous Public Art competition.”

“I kind of want it.”

“It does have a sort of fantastic awfulness to it that’s strangely appealing, but it’s still awful.”

“If it was man-portable it’d be perfect to wheel into the guest room to stand at the foot of the bed in the middle of the night.”

Strangest dream I’ve had in awhile, and that’s saying something given the competition: Doug, Rise of the Machines.

Strangest dream I’ve had in awhile, and that’s saying something given the competition: Doug, Rise of the Machines.

A ways back in the week when I was pretty crunched for time and motivation, Blunt Object ranted about an article on Slate badly misunderstanding genetics and what we can know from it. It’s pretty typical boilerplate biology-is-scary stuff, or at least the part he’s ranting about is; there’s essentially one paragraph of raw stupidity in the middle of an otherwise reasonable piece talking about the implications of fetal genotyping. The relevant paragraph:

What fetal genes might one day suggest about a baby’s eye color, appearance, and intellectual ability will be useful to parents, not insurers. But with costs coming down and insurers interested in other aspects of the fetal genome, a Gattaca-like two-tiered society, in which parents with good access to health care produce flawless, carefully selected offspring and the rest of us spawn naturals, seems increasingly plausible.

Well… no, not really. To put it mildly. If the world worked like this I’d be able to write poetry in Linear A, but merely finding something that does something in particular and making some more or less educated guess as to what it does does not translate into being able to use it for engineering.

The analogy Blunt used was programming, and it’s a pretty good one; I set out to quote it for effect but wound up concluding it really just needs to be read in its entirety. It’s not long, and is resistant to excerpting.

The only issue with his analogy is that it doesn’t even capture the impossibility of pulling off something like the Slate author’s scenario adequately; at least a piece of computer hardware and its programming were produced via a process we could find relatively intuitive. Genomes were produced by evolution, with no one on hand trying even remotely to ensure that the code was efficient or clean, let alone commented. Kludges and elegant solutions exist side by side, sometimes in several different copies, some of which are broken and others of which do subtly different things in each version. Much of the information is if-then instructions and operating instructions, sometimes to provide for cases that are remote or no longer exist. If your computer were equivalent, it would have every operating system and program you had ever used installed at once, with the instructions for which pieces work for what and are active at any given time being completely hidden information. All possible hardware styles and protocols are present as well, and which ones are active or not is equally obscure.

Among the list of what the fetal testing is meant to do: determine Rh-factor, sex of child, presence of Down’s syndrome. Testing for any of these things is not like looking for a line of code in a computer program; it’s like seeing if a hard drive rattles or not when you pick it up, or how many USB ports there are. The number of chromosomes as well as what kind there are at pair 23 is determinable by technology we’ve had since the early part of the twentieth century; it is to genotyping as correctly naming a shape to be a square is to polygonal geometry.

Let’s tackle the first line in the author’s GATTACA scenario piece by piece:

What fetal genes might one day suggest about a baby’s eye color, appearance, and intellectual ability

1. Do you know we currently have no idea how eye color genetics work beyond two genes that happen to handle “blue” or “brown” relatively straightforwardly? Beyond that we know that there are many more genes that affect eye color, that there are two more genes that definitely do something though we’re not positive what, that there might be as many as 16, and that green and gray and hazel are handled somewhere entirely different, but you’re simply not going to know what color a baby’s eyes are going to be based on even its entire genome- because we only know what two genes are going to do and can’t even find the rest to see if they’re present and what they’re going to do.

2. You can know everything about a baby’s appearance that is determined by a single, stand-alone trait that we know about, understand to be a trait influenced by a single gene or at least a manageable handful of them, and know exactly which gene does that. Compared to all factors of a baby’s appearance, the number of traits this describes is teeny tiny. If the driving force of your curiosity is knowing whether a baby boy’s ears will have attached pinnae, you’re in luck*.

3. We don’t currently even know what intellectual ability quite is. We can’t nail down a single test accurately measuring “general intelligence”, all the tests we currently have produce wildly different results from one another, and while we know more or less that there are different cognitive domains and skills, we can’t nail any of them down particularly well either. Worse than that, we understand vaguely that intelligence is more of an emergent property of many systems and skills, but we can’t quantify or measure it well. For something like a car, “speed” is an emergent property with no corresponding part of the car that develops out of nearly every other part of the car- but we can concretely and easily measure speed.

Most of what we know about genetics and intelligence can be summed as this: 1)It seems to be, broadly, heritable, and 2)cognitive impairments are much, much easier to detect and quantify than variations in normal intelligence or extremely high intelligence. This is, in fact, what IQ tests were originally designed for- picking out those sufficiently impaired to need different schooling. We can expect legitimate bioethics issues surrounding the ability to detect those sorts of cognitive impairments caused by developmental disorders that are known and genetically quantifiable- not engineered superbabies versus dull “naturals”.

So, of the author’s three projected super-baby traits, one of them is a simple thing that turns out very much not to be on the genetic end, and two are emergent gestalt qualities we cannot even quantify, let alone reverse-engineer. Provided we develop the ability to directly engineer in the first place, which currently we can’t.

As science-fiction-come-reality scares go, I’m not that impressed.

*Actually I’m lying. This old chestnut of simple Mendelian genetics, as well as sex-linked traits, turns out to involve multiple alleles of opaque effect as well. Surprise!