Daily Archives: May 19, 2011

My birthday present

Posted on by

Today is my birthday. At midnight, I turned 38. 40 is coming for me, I can feel it.

And just in time for my special day, the news cycle has served me a nice big slice of cake. And it’s in my favorite all time flavour : Republican pain!

And the ice cream on the side : it’s the pain of a dipshit from the past, Newt Gingrich, whose barely a week old Presidential campaign has already crashed on the rocks of his own inability to speak in public without saying something completely stupid.

And boy, did he top himself this time. He appeared on heavy duty respectable Sunday political interview show Meet the Press, and just happened to both disparage Paul Ryan’s evil Libertarian social engineering budget, and endorse universal mandate health care!

And that’s bad enough right there. You want the Republican nomination and you go completely against the key piece of legislation the Republicans are defending right now in Congress, one that is extremely unpopular with the general public because of its attacks on Medicare and programs for women and children and one supported by all but four Republican Congressmen? And then you are surprised when this makes the whole rabid dog pack turn on you and rip you apart with their eager, slavering jaws?

And the thing is, it’s not a bad policy statement in and of itself. He said he didn’t like right wing social engineering any more than left wing, and said Ryan’s budget was too radical. That is a perfectly acceptable moderate libertarian view on the matter.

But I don’t know what Republican party he thought he was addressing during these fatal moments, but it sure wasn’t that sorry lot that makes up the American Right right now. Maybe there was a time when there was space for a little public dissension amongst prominent American conservatives, but George Dubya “Dissent Means The Terrorists Win” Bush and the massive cognitive dissonance demands on the public conservative psyche supporting such an embarrassing and incompetent leader placed on it have long closed that gap and then welded it shut with an acetylene torch.

Now, the slightest bit of off-message messaging gets brutally punished, as is always the case when the aforementioned cognitive dissonance load makes the people carrying it feel extraordinary pain in the brain whenever anything stimulates it. When your psyche is basically now a big red throbbing sore the size of Texas because of all the cognitive dissonance you are suppressing, the slightest breeze makes it howl with agony, and you find yourself desperately hunting down any opposition with the same sort of manic fervor that a desperately sleepy person shows in hunting down that dripping faucet keeping them awake.

Into this scenario comes Newt’s remarks, which is, in this analogy, like suddenly starting up a full brass marching bad right next to our sleepy friend’s eardrum.

That said, if he had simply made the remarks and stuck by them, asserting his right to have his own opinion and staking out his territory as a less-crazy-than-average conservative who appeals to the Republicans who are not happy with how things are going, that would have allowed him to retain some honour and dignity, and might even have given him a chance to stay in this Presidential race as an outsider candidate.

But of course, that sort of honor and integrity and character is completely foreign and alien to the modern American Right. So immediately after the interview, he starting backpedaling, and now, quite paradoxically, he’s claiming that asking him what he thought of something was some kind of gotcha journalism and that anyone who accurately quotes said interview is actually lying.

To me, the funniest part of this for us who remember the 90’s is that people are even vaguely surprised that this is what happens when Newt talks. I clearly remember his rapid rise to prominence…. and his even more rapid disappearance. The moment he became Speaker after successfully executing his Contract On America, he started saying bizarre stupid shit in interviews that made the whole Republican party look bad, and lo and behold, suddenly, you stopped hearing from him entirely.

He is obviously a guy best suited for intellectual behind the scenes leadership. Put a microphone in his face, and he makes Quayle seem like the picture of poise and gravitas.

And with him cutting himself off at the knees, and Huckabee and Trump bowing out, the Republican race shedding frontrunners at a furious pace.

I can’t wait to see who stumbles next.

Bonus science news!

Posted on by

There’s just too much cool science news around for me to wait till Friday to tell you, so you lucky people get a bonus helping of science this week!

Plus I am too sleepy to write anything more difficult. Stupid sleep apnea.

First up : robots inventing their own language!

It’s the result of a rather clever and well thought out experiment. Basically, folks at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Institute of Technology took your usual little box-on-wheels robots, with a camera for seeing and a laser range finder for avoiding collisions, and gave them ears and a mouth – or rather, a microphone and speakers – and let them loose in a maze to play simple games.

The robots were programmed assign random names to places they visit, and say those names out loud, and through this, slowly build up a map of their environment.

Obviously, these two robots, called “Lingobots”, are not exactly going to be chatting with anyone about the latest sports game any time soon. But I admire the simple and effective experimental design, stripping the problem of language down to its most basic level by using arbitrary random labels (which is all words are, after all) and building on top of the existing spatially-aware robot designs already well established by previous robotics engineers.

As a result, we have a very interesting experiment that is sure to expand out knowledge of both artificial intelligence and the nature of human language as well.

Way to go, Queensland nerds!

Moving into considerably more controversial science, a firm in the United Kingdom will soon be offering people a chance to take a test to tell you how long you will live.

Now, don’t worry, this isn’t like that Robert A. Heinlein story, Life-Line. where Doctor Pinero could tell you exactly how long you will live and exactly when you will die regardless of the cause of your death. We are not to that level of near-mystical science yet.

Instead, this will be a simple blood test which capitalizes (quite prematurely, in my honest opinion) on the recent discovery that the length of the telomeres in one’s blood and the length of one’s life share a strong correlation.

The shorter the telomeres, the shorter the life, in other words.

In fact, this line of research has suggested that these telomeres might very well be the measuring stick of life, the burning candle that your body uses in order to know how old you are and hence when various age-dependent life processes, like puberty or old age, should start and stop.

This dangles the tantalizing prospect of a cure for all aging via simply returning one’s telomeres to the desired length somehow. Pick an age, any age, and in the future, telomere repair therapy could freeze you at that age, and as long as you kept up the treatment, you would never get a day older, at least as far as your body knows.

“Old age” is only one of the reasons we get sicker as we get older, however. There’s accumulation of toxins, the long term effects of gravity on body tissues, and parts just plain old wearing out.

Still, telomeretelomeres involved, and a test like this could do a lot more harm than good. People could make very important life-changing decision will long-term repercussions based on this test.

And speaking of making long term decisions that will change the rest of your life, how about voluntarily getting your hand amputated so you can replace it with a robot hand?

And you thought waking up after a night out with a bad tattoo was harsh!

Luckily, it’s not quite what it sounds like. True, the patient has a living hand, and is getting that hand removed in order to make room for a bionic replacement, but the hand is completely useless due to nerve damage from a motorcycle accident. No movement, no feeling.

So it’s not just a case of someone saying “I am bored with my perfectly functional hand, and want to be a cyborg”. It’s fully medically justified, in my opinion. Sure, the hand is still alive, but functionally, it’s dead, and squeamishness about taking off a living hand and replacing it with a robot model is no excuse for condemning this poor young man to a life without the use of a hand and impeding the progress of science towards a day when we can replace any limb with bionic parts should disaster fall.

Still, not hard to imagine a future where people get this done just for fashion, is it?