The Beginnings of Brain Implants & Artificial Intelligence. . .

BBC NEWS | Technology | Mouse brain simulated on computer

This is the first necessary, but not sufficient step towards the creation both of artificial intelligence, but also brain tissue-computer chip interfacing. This last presents the possibility of being able to "download" entire sections of world history, quantum mechanics, or learn a new language relatively effortlessly.

Of course Terminator predicted that AI would spontaneously generate and become a threat to humanity on August 29, 1997. We've made it 10 years past that deadline, and I'm not sure how to feel about the advent of AIs with complex reasoning skills. Its possible that their emergence will cement the current social strata and hinder vertical income movement.

From the BBC article:

US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.
The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.
In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.
Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.

Potentially scary stuff. How do our politics catch up with such potential social change? How will the current faux left-right structure be replace by a dominant, shared national ideology that could be effortlessly transmitted to anyone by virtue of a brain-computer automatic "update." How do such advances interact with advances in biotechnology and is there some type of possible synergy.

Looks like 20th Century Science Fiction may eventually become 21st Century science and consumer goods.

Support the Innocence Project

The 200th person innocently sent to death prison was freed this week due to the work of the Innocence Project.

Jerry Miller was cleared because DNA testing proved he couldn’t have committed the crime for which he was accused. An Illinois judge this week exonerated 48, of all charges relating to a brutal 1981 rape after Chicago police tested Miller's DNA against DNA found at the crime scene. The test cleared Miller, who was paroled in 2006 after serving 25 years. As a result of this week’s order, Miller will no longer be required to register as a sex offender.

The work the Innocence Project does is essential in preserving public support for the Death Penalty. The more people freed BEFORE DNA exonerration, the fewer "martyr cases" to rally around by the left.

I am a staunch supporter of the Death Penatly, but it must be applied fairly and appropriately in each case. And I believe that positive DNA evidence should be mandatory in all Death Penalty convictions.

I also believe the Death Penatly should apply to all pre-meditated murders, all violent rapes, and all sexual crimes against children.

Why Republicans Should Like Obama (but not necessarily vote for him)

Barack Obama did well in the debates tonight. That's not why GOPers should like him. Republicans should like him because as a person he represents the type of world in which Republicans want to live (minus the patriarchal oppression of women). He is a true product of the meritocracy. He used his natural abilities to become part of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the "Natural Aristocracy." He was elected the first African-American head of the Law Review through a competitive process and has been excelling ever since.

He also has spent a significant portion of his life working to improve local communities. While he may persue policy goals Republicans find anathema, he does so honorably and to achieve goals that republicans often share.

In short, he may not be a member of the GOP or support its platform, but his life story is exactly the story Republicans want for everyone. Onward and upward for everyone through competition and commitment to community.

Happy Hour Boycott is on

DHS is officially the new FEMA . . .

. . . in the conspiracy community. Of course this may seem obvious 5 years after 9/11 and the resulting creation of DHS which, of course then became the new FEMA. It only took mainstream media culture (MMC) 5 years to officially catch up. (FEMA had played prominently in conspiracy culture for about 15 years prior to this).

I am of course referring to Jericho's revelation that the Department of Homeland Security is the party culpable for setting off the nukes and creating a new "emergency government."

I guess Rayelan and Theresa (and their associated communities) get it right sometimes.

Alien Abduction is All in Your Head

Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors - LiveScience - MSNBC.com:

Here's the money quote:

"Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors. "

Of course, couldn't the memory loss be caused by the repeated abductions. In statistics that would be called the alternative hypothesis and I doubt anyone tested it here.

CVS Responds to A Mo(u)rning Portrait

As mentioned in a follow-up item to the guy who criticized me for not helping the old man at CVS (which I actually did do), I mentioned that Ms. Uneven called CVS to share her thoughts on the matter.

CVS responded very positively in writing and promised to send someone to the store to make sure that the store was following all CVS customer service guidelines. Someone from their corporate office is going to take this up with all 3 pharmacy techs and the manager.

Even though the individual employees did not display the level of customer service one would hope for, the corporate response is excellent and CVS gets mad kudos from US.

Another U.S. Governor Has UFO Sighting

The first was Jimmy Carter when he was governor of Georgia. Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington says UFOs flew over Phoenix in '97. The money quote:

"I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people," Symington said Thursday. "I don't know why people would ridicule it."

Symington, who was in his second term as governor of Arizona during the Phoenix Lights incident, recently told a UFO investigator making a documentary that he had kept quiet about his personal close encounter because he didn't want to panic the populace.

The two notable things about this are: (1) Symington is a very credible witness as both a trained pilot and high ranking government official; and (2) fear of panicking the public as a reason to cover up alien contact has become a cultural meme.

In fact, there would have been good cause to believe (2) 60 years ago. The pandemonium caused by the Orson Welles's radio broadcast of War of the Worlds had occured fewer than 10 years before the Roswell crash. Any Eisenhower Administration official involved in the Roswell event would have had this in the forefront of his mind when handling the issue.

Assuming you believe the Roswell events occurred, then there are some very interesting questions. Have we been gradualy accurated to the idea of extraterrestrial biological entities through our popular culture for the past 60 years? If so, how would we react now if the government actually revealed "the truth" about Roswell? Would we behave as our grandparents had in the 1930s, or would we just shrug it off and silently think "I knew it!" Would the government reveal such information to the public before developing weapons to defend ourselves from the new "invasive" species?

The cultural impact of such a governmental revelation, if mishandled, (and is there a correct way to handle it?) COULD be severe. The political consequences range from impeachment of the President and Vice-President whose administration revealed the info (because they hadn't come clean sooner and had covered it up) to a sprawling decades long Congressional investigation. And then there's the potential religious upheavel which is impossible to estimate.

The massive potential chaos caused by such a revelation could reverberate around the globe and result in a global temporary autonomous zone. What an event to live through. It would be almost like living through the Biblical endtimes. Maybe that's why the meme keeps spreading - it simply updates an underlying fear.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Roswell event.

The Revolution Will Be Webcast

A Brave New World of Political Skulduggery? - washingtonpost.com

Finally, politics has embraced our post-modern condition with thr massive dissemination of the Hillary-Obama 1984 ad via (print, tv and web) media in addition to blog and email forwards. The ad is everything good about post-modernism - the mixing of media (video and text), the use of sampling (the reuse of the 1984 Macintosh commercial - aired during that year's superbowl incidentally), superbly crafted subtext(s) (which I go into here using only the video and not the audio) and the ability to spread itself virally. Oh Joy!

Gil Scott Heron was right in that the Revolution will not be televised. It will be brought about by thousands of free spirits creatively using the tools at their disposal to effect massive change. James Carville once made the point that the entire Renaissance was only 1500 people but they changed the world. This ad could herald something similar. I hope it really is the beginning of "citizen political ads" as the MSM has stated. And this WaPo article makes the point that the commercial was made very easily. While it "only" reached a few million of our 300 million citizens, those are the people paying attention early and who will be opinion and grassroots leaders in their communities.

This brings me to a point I haven't made on this blog yet. Namely, that political campaigns belong to the people, not the politicians. Abominations like McCain-Feingold give politicians too much control over the direction of political debate and cultural discourse by limiting who may participate and when they may participate. This is simply the political class's unique version of rent-seeking.

Ads like this show that the barrier to entry for political ads (now that YouTube and its rivals exist) is extremely low and relatively inexpensive. Normal citizens can now make their own advertisements (assuming the FEC doesn't freak out and ban them all) very cheaply and still have impact. What happens now is the question.

Another Nation Admits to Trackg UFOs

Breitbart reports that France has opened its secret UFO files to the public. These files cover 50 years of sitings.

It's fairly interesting that France is the second nation since 2005 to admit to researching UFOs up to the present day. The U.S. Disclosure Project has been trying to accomplish the same thing over here, even though Project Blue Book was officially closed in the late 1960s.

There are really two explanations as to why elite members of these last two nations are pushing to open their nations' respective files:

1) To prove that "there's no there there" and try to dispel the growing cultural belief in alien visitations (Jung would have an interesting take on the UFO phenomena).

2) It is part of the gradual acculturation process that began decades ago with the first alien-human contact during the Eisenhower Administration with the crash at Roswell.

Occam's Razor says that option (1) is more likely. I think I'll go with that one. The second option is too creepy to contemplate in any event.

Of course, we can now get into a conversation about Faction One vs. Faction Two, but we'll leave that for another time.

Hey Asshole - More info on CVS poor service

If you're going to leave a comment, be a (wo)man about it and leave an actual email address for me to respond to your comments and criticisms - and I will respond via email to comments. (Aside from this post) I'm not going to waste my blog space on replying to idiot/self-righteous morons. Unfortunately, some people are too cowardly to leave comments w/o doing it anonymously.

To the asshole who wrote saying I should have helped the old guy at CVS and criticized me for not being a decent human:

The fact is that I am the one who asked her to call the pharmacy tech from the day before, and Ms. Uneven suggested the pharmacy tech call her doctor. Yes, I used some literary license - it is afterall called a "portrait" as opposed to an actual retelling of the event. If you don't understand the difference, look at the differences between James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man vs. his actual biography. There are significant differences. Too bad you're too much of a coward to leave an actual email address to respond to so that we could have a real conversation about this.

For the record, the portrait was of an old man being beaten down by the beauracracy. It wasn't supposed to be a completely true story, just the outlines of a sad one.

Deconstructing the Hillary-Obama 1984 Ad

The Hillary-Obama Ad is a great juxtaposition of the most famous commerical of all time (Apple's initial upstart assault on dominant Microsoft, in turn based on Orwell's 1984) with the dates of the a previous general election and the commercial's first airing (1984) and the next general election 2008. Scroll down to watch the ad.

What happened in the 1984 election? - the Democratic candidate annointed by primogeniture (as only Republicans do), Walter Mondale, had beaten off an insurgent campaign based on new ideas and charisma, Gary Hart, to lose in a disastrous landslide in the 1984 general election (to Ronald Reagan). The visual reference to the 1984 commercial also provides the undertones (subtexts) that Hillary:

(1) Is Big Brother, again enforcing orthodoxy
(2) Again advancing through primogeniture in a party which finds such a process alien to its political DNA and distateful to its (small d) democratic roots.
(3) Will lose disastrously because (1) will produce an result completely in sync with the American People

What could happen in the 2008 election? - The American people, tired of the same (type) of people running the government as those of the last 20 years will pick a new (type?) of politician. It could be Barack Obama, Chuck Hagel, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore and a few others.

The visual statement: "2008 won't be like 1984" provides the undertones (subtexts):

1) It won't be Hillary. She represents the continuity of the political past, not the break from it we're all yearning for.
2) The above-referenced yearning which didn't really exist in 1984 because people were relatively satisified with President Reagan
3) Poses a direct challenge to Hillary (from the Obama campaign based on the logo, but they have denied it).
4) Hillary as recipient of the "two-minute hate" against which true-believers can rebel.

A Mo(u)rning Portrait

At the Waterfrong CVS earlier today (store #1348) , I overheard a distraught elderly gentlman patiently trying to pick up medicine for his wife/daughter (I wasn't paying that much attention). Apparently CVS had misplaced the prescritions he dropped off yesterday so that he could have them today. The CVS technician offered neither to call the doctor (most of which have answering services for emergencies) nor to call the CVS pharmacy tech working yesterday (whom he described well - I've been to that pharmacy before) to find out if she knew if she had misplaced them.

Instead of helping him resolve the issue, she blew him off and shooed him out. When he asked if she would call the doctor about the prescriptions, she said it was unlikely the doc would answer and his best bet would be to come back tomorrow. She also refused to call the accurately-describted pharmacy tech. As he patiently pointed out (if it were ME, I'd be boiling over at this point), he had dropped off the prescriptions Yesterday so he could have them TODAY for his sick loved one. No one should have to wait a day for basic medical treatment because a retail employee is lazy.

Watching him shuffle out of the door has darkened my mood. I hope that missing one day of medication won't harm his loved one's medical treatment. I wish customer service were a bigger priority for CVS pharmacies.

I think I'll transfer my prescriptions to a different branch or find a entirely new pharmacy in my neighborhood - hopefully I can find a locally-owned one.

External Validation Rocks!

"I even saw the lights of the Goodyear blimp, and it read Uneven Steven's a pimp." (With apologies to Ice Cube)

Of course, it WAS an honor to be nominated. I'd like to give a shout out to the Dewey Crew who have been calling me "Big Sexy" for years - you know who you are (of course most of those people have actually partied with me). I'm also grateful for the many votes I received from the DC blogging community. While some of the gracious people in this community know (and have done body shots with) me, not enough of you could possibly know me for me to win this award straight out. But thanks again for (further) external validation.

I won because of the method of voting. Different methods of voting produce different results. There is a whole branch of Rational Choice Political Theory dedicated to the different results that different voting methodologies produce. This is important enough that Democrats and Republicans both have crafted specific rules on legislative issue in hope of engendering their desired result through "democratic" means. Both parties are equally known for using their majority power to structure favorable voting rules for legislation coming to the floor (the acually most important method for determining what public policy will pass the House of Representatives). Both parties had their favorite rules, but the previous Democratic majority was masterful at it in a way that Republican never were. We'll have to see how this Democratic majority fairs

Being the second or third choice for most people when you're able to cast four per person means that you can be nobody's favorite and still win. This raises significant issues as to whether someone coming in first in such a contest (e.g., myself) is actually the democratic choice. In some sense the only contestant that can claim to be the "true" democratic choice is the "Condorcet winner", the one that beats EVERY other option in a head-to-head competition. I likely would not since I don't know enough of you.

All of that said, I DO APPRECIATE THE VOTES.

- US

Oh C'Mon, typical incompetence is not a conspiracy

Apparently, Mayor Nagin Suspects a plot To keep blacks away from New Orleans. Apparently it's all part of some plot by evil Republicans (or whichever party is now the party of racists - it used by the Dems until Nixon's Southern Strategy) to use natural disasters to disperse populations to benefit their party. Doubtful.

(ed - but Hurricane Katrina really did vastly redistribute hundreds of thousands of poor people who had never left their home neighborhoods, let alone towns. Many of them won't be coming back. But the lack of federal help (i.e., tax expenditures) in bringing these people back to New Orleans doesn't make it a conspiracy)

The government is generally very bad at big things (like this), and very good at little things (actually processing Social Security checks etc.). And I doubt the folks that brought us the Iraq War (complete with flower offering children), the ham-handed firings of the US Attorneys, and Plamegate could really get away with something like this.

Bad things happen. There's not always an invisible hand (except in capitalism) no matter how much we want the bad things to be CAUSED so that we have someone/thing to rail against.

A True Conspiracy? Did RFK Really Kill Marilyn?

FBI file links Kennedy to Monroe's death - World - smh.com.au

According to this articlte, the FBI had an ACTUAL FILE about RFK's role in inducing Marilyne Monroe's suicide. Even more, it was buried for DECADES as a classified document that detailed RKF's on and off again sexual relationship w/ Norma Jean. Apparently, it even conjectures that RFK had her killed when she realized he had no intention of divorcing his wife and marrying her.

Of course, this is a Kennedy Hater's dream.

Taegan Goddard Describes My Life

This describes a lot of my life w/ a few caveats. I really like to read Political Wire before the WaPo or NYT, and having a dual-tuner TiVo means never having to get out of bed to tape anything on Sunday. Plus, the PBS and local weekend political shows are always worth watching. I'm also pretty much over Prime Minister's question hour until there's a new PM (though that's just a matter of taste and I think we should require something similar of our President(s).


Instructions for becoming a political junkie, courtesy of Political Insider. (Required reading for college students and budding politicos).

But enough about me.

The routine of one obsessed political junkie:

DAILY TASKS: Wake up. Check Drudge. Read the NYT and WaPo. Check Political Wire, the hotline blog, politico.com, the AP wire, the Reuters political wire, and MSNBC.com. Read ABC's The Note when it arrives in my inbox, around 10am. Throughout the day, check Drudge at least once an hour, check Political Wire a few times, check the hotline blog every hour or two. Once or twice a day, read Wonkette, Political Insider, potomacflacks.com, cqpolitics.com, HuffingtonPost, and TVNewser. Watch Hardball at 5pm or 7pm. During commercials, check in on Sit Room.

MUST READS: Everything by Howard Fineman (Newsweek). Almost everything by George Will. Everything by David Yepsen and Tom Beaumont (DM Register). Everything written by Mike Allen and Roger Simon (Politico).

TRICKS OF THE TRADE: Keep '08 staff list. Google alert names of spokespeople from campaigns to follow messaging. Check presidential websites weekly.

MONDAYS: Read Dana Milbank's Washington Sketch (WaPo).

TUESDAYS: Read E.J. Dionne's column in the WaPo.

WEDNESDAYS: Read Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman's NYT columns.

THURSDAYS: Read Novak's column. Read John DiStaso's weekly Union Leader column. Read David Brooks' Thursday NYT column.

FRIDAYS: Read the Time articles that matter. Tivo HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

WEEKEND: Savvy political junkies know that Novak's must read "Inside Report" column is printed on townhall.com on Saturday, a full day before it's available in his syndicated column. Read Maureen Dowd's Sat column in the NYT. Read David Brooks' Sun NYT column. Tivo all three network Sunday talk shows and FNC's Fox News Sunday. Tivo the Chris Matthews Show. Tivo McLaughlin Group and McLaughlin One-on-One. (Sunday recording requires taping shows at the same time). Watch at my leisure on Sunday. Watch C-SPAN's Road to the White House on Sunday night. Fall asleep watching Prime Minister's questions on C-SPAN.

REPEAT

Plagiarism is the Sincerest Form of Flattery - I'm looking at you Jazz Chill Corner

Jazz Chill Corner decided to repost my 2007 Music Festival listing w/o any type of attribution. You can compare them side by side - a his here and mine here and you'll see they're identical. He couldn't even be bothered to add a few new ones.

Not only does this probably violate my creative commons license, it's just rude not to give credit where it's due. It's called a footnote in academia (or a hat tip in the blogosphere). When I reposted E)'s stoner job search ad and commented on it, I gave her credit because that's appropriate.

While I'm flattered, it'a just not polite to acknowldege my hard work to compile that list (and solicit more info for future updates) or provide a link to the original source.

Gotta Love the Post-Modernism of Robotics Ethics Laws Based on Asimov

The tradition of SciFi writers predicting the future continues and has now advanced from Jules Verne to Isaac Asimov. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get to some of the things Heinlein predicted.

That said there is something vaguely creepy about an entire national obsession with robots and the need for a nation to actually have a robotic ethics codes. Even the Europeans are getting in on the act. Though it does make practical sense for nations whose populations are imploding. However, it seems premature to establish robotic ethics at all before any of them pass the Turing test.

The most interesting implications of robotics combined w/limited AI are those related to creating sex robots. And all new successful technology from the VCR to the internet has been driven through its applicability to pornography (and making its use more anonymous). If robots are to become commonplace this is the most profitable place for manufacturers/researchers to start. And regardless of what I think, it's only a matter of time before some company starts doing this. Most likely Korea or Japan due to the population pressures mentioned above (which is getting worse due to the aborting of what would be female children in those cultures - we're actually witnessing cultural suicide, from a detached perspective, it would make an excellent PhD thesis).

The positive aspects the spread of sex robots could virtually eliminate trafficking in women and sexual slavery. This has enormous potential to reduce human rights abuses and vastly improve the lives of women around the world since sexual slavery would become comparatively more expensive.

Of course, despite these positive cultural impacts, the christianists likely will rise up in outraged opposition. I'm sure they'll find some obscure Biblical passage to justify opposing another form of sexual release. More likely however, they'll just trot out the chestnut about Onan. Any literate reader of Scripture would realize his punishment was due to "gaming the system" to keep fucking his sister-in-law - which Hebrew law condoned in order to give her a son, but which activity would have to stop once she became pregnant - not for having sex that didn't result in conception (even the Song of Songs praises sexuality) which as become the justification for opposing birth control etc.

Does it matter what the Pope thinks about Biotech?

Obviously the Pope's opinion is wrong, especially his comments on artificical insemination for infertile couples (doesn't that go against God's command to "be fruitful and multiply" - of course people like Benedict don't really use logic). Additionally, the Pope is wrong and Andrew Sullivan right on gay marriage - if you're pro-marriage you allow gays to have civil union because it would provide the same social benefits to and from these couples that married people receive.

But does it even matter that he has an opinion? He is not the head of Christendom, only Catholicism (which recently has been seeking to reconcile with many of the protestant denominations). Aside from Catholics and christianists, do we even care?Most Europeans seem to ignore him. And what about the Chinese who have no cultural connection to the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam)? It's unlikely they would respond to his opinion either.

Additionally, the entire protestant movement was based on the idea that the Catholic church was too dogmatic and didn't allow others to interpret Christianity as they saw fit. So there's really no reason for him to pay much attention to him since the Anglican Church, to which I belong, does not agree with him.