What's New by Bob Park - Friday, July 21, 2006

Bob Park had a few choice comments in this Week's What's New.

On Stem Cells. "On Wednesday, Mr. Bush vetoed the 'Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act.' The first veto of his presidency was exercised to protect surplus embryonic stem cells in fertility clinics from research, thus preserving their 'dignity' so they can be put out with the garbage."

On an Anit-Balistic Missile System. "In 1984, President Reagan called on the scientific community to render nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete" with the Star Wars missile defense system. Nine years and $30B later SDI was terminated. There was nothing to show for it. George W. Bush, who knows as much science as Reagan did, declared we would have a missile defense by 2004. When North Korea announced last month it would test a missile capable of reaching San Francisco, the Pentagon revealed our missile defense had never been turned on. Why bother? The reason ballistic missile are such a powerful threat is that they are virtually unstoppable, but if we learned anything from 9/11 it is that terrorists can strike us without ballistic missiles. We have only the threat of preemptive strikes or retaliation. The Wall Street Journal today called for an ABM system to deter terror regimes, "they won't invest their money in weapons that won't work." No, only we do that."

On Penance."Last week I agreed to any penance readers thought appropriate for allowing myself to be used on the (bleep) ABC Primetime program about Adam Dreamhealer. By consensus—I mean two—readers called for the same punishment. I am to obtain a DVD of "What the Bleep Do We Know" and watch it all the way through - twice."

eSnips

I just uploaded my pretty face to eSnips, for which this is a free plug.

They give you 1GB of free storage for whatever you want. It's hard for me to see how they will make enough money from advertising, but that's their business model.

I've been using it mainly to back up files and as a way to transfer files from home to to work without having to send them by email.

Apparently they don't let you link directly to stuff that you store, though. The picture to the right above doesn't appear unless you're logged in as me. Try clicking on it, though.

Are we the center of the Universe?

From an Edge Talk with Lawrence Krauss

. When you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you … see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun … That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

Blue

  Click here for more.

Five Minutes

From Tricycle

If you pay attention for just five minutes … you learn that pleasant sensations lead to the desire that these sensations will stay and that unpleasant sensations lead to the hope that they will go away. And both the attraction and the aversion amount to tension in the mind. Both are uncomfortable. So in the first minutes, you get a big lesson about suffering: wanting things to be other than what they are. Such a tremendous amount of truth to be learned just closing your eyes and paying attention to bodily sensations.

--Sylvia Boorstein

What I find particularly interesting is how everything is up for grabs with respect to awareness. The desires that pleasant sensations continue and that unpleasant sensations stop are very natural and normal. Boorstein isn't saying that one should attempt to banish those desires. She is saying that it's useful to be aware of having desires even as basic as these. It is important to be able to step back even a little bit from one's desires and simply be aware of their existence.

Conservative Anger Grows Over Bush's Foreign Policy

From the Washington Post

President Bush is facing a new and swiftly building backlash on the right over his handling of foreign affairs.

Conservative intellectuals and commentators who once lauded Bush for what they saw as a willingness to aggressively confront threats and advance U.S. interests said in interviews that they perceive timidity and confusion about long-standing problems including Iran and North Korea, as well as urgent new ones such as the latest crisis between Israel and Hezbollah. …

Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon. …

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a bid for president, called the administration's latest moves abroad a form of appeasement. "We have accepted the lawyer-diplomatic fantasy that talking while North Korea builds bombs and missiles and talking while the Iranians build bombs and missiles is progress," he said in an interview. "Is the next stage for Condi to go dancing with Kim Jong Il?" he asked, referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the North Korean leader.

"I am utterly puzzled," Gingrich added.

Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan administration arms-control official who is close to Vice President Cheney, said he believes foreign policy innovation for White House ended with Bush's second inaugural address, a call to spread democracy throughout the world.

"What they are doing on North Korea or Iran is what [Sen. John F.] Kerry would do, what a normal middle-of-the-road president would do," he said. "This administration prided itself on molding history, not just reacting to events. Its a normal foreign policy right now. It's the triumph of Kerryism."

"What we have learned about how not to fool ourselves."

Bob Parks of What's New quoted Richard Feynman as having said that this is what science is all about.

Although I like this quotation, I think it leaves out a lot. Science doesn't help us in not fooling ourselves about our own subjective experience. Feynman enjoyed playing the bongo drums and being around naked women. His ability to be aware of and take pleasure in these experiences was one of his charms. He knew he liked them; he wasn't obsessed by them; he enjoyed them when the situation was appropriate.

We don't (at least so far) have a science that helps us work with (and keep us from fooling ourselves about) our subjective experience. What we've learned about not fooling ourselves in this domain is that we fool ourselves when we lose self-awareness. (Can that be made into scientific statement?) The best science-like disciplines we've developed along these lines are humanistic psychology and Buddhism. Neither would qualify as a traditional science. So I'd put it this way.

Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is. Buddhism and humanistic psychology are what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about our subjective experience.

Bartending, RFID Style

eWeek.com reports.

A Miami-based 7-year-old beverage-monitoring software company is drinking from the keg of RFID and is selling a tilt switch that attaches to bottles and updates an Internet database every time the bottle is poured. … It's not merely recording how many times the bottle is poured, but it factors in the tilt of the bottle, the duration of the pour and the bartender's pouring style to calculate how much liquid is leaving the bottle.

"The software converts the tilt into an estimated volume, and the conversion is automatically perfected based on the history of each bottle; hence it becomes more accurate over time and adapts to each bartender's habits. When the bottle is empty, our sensor knows it and the software readjusts the historical pours of each bottle to the known volume of the bottle," said Beverage Metrics CEO David Teller, who said his company has between $5 million and $10 million in annual revenue. "Our system reconciles pours to ring-ups and recipes and automatically decides what is a long pour that should be changed to two pours [and] when to combine short pours in sequence."

Because the server that watches the tilt-tracking RFID system also tracks the POS (point-of-sale) system, it can also know what ingredients bartenders are using to make drinks and whether they are following the authorized recipes in addition to whether they are pouring too much or too little.

Sounds great, but …

John Fontanella, an RFID analyst with the Aberdeen Group, dubbed Teller's system "an interesting idea" but wondered whether wireless rings around the bottles would scare off customers and chill some of the bartender-drinker relationship.

"Will it be invisible to customers? Remember those machines that were used to accurately pour a drink every time? They were all over the place, and now I never see one. There is a reason why: It ruins the intimacy created between customer and bartender," Fontanella said. "Good bartenders take care of good customers. It's as simple as that, and that's what brings them back. If the customer is unaware, or if it is in a bar with a great deal of transient traffic, it makes sense."

But Fontanella is even more cynical about whether it will truly minimize theft. "I'm already thinking about how bartenders will beat this," he said. "They will find a way."

Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment

From EepyBird.com - Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment

Martin Gardner

Jochen Fromm, who is continually coming up with interesting items, found this interview with Martin Gardner from a year ago. Here are a couple of brief excerpts.

Gardner: Uri Geller does [things that] are not done by magicians. Magicians would be ashamed to stand up in front of an audience and bend a spoon! It seems too silly. …

Notices: So how does he bend a spoon?

Gardner: He gains access to the spoons before the demonstration. If you take an ordinary spoon, it’s easy to bend it. You can bend it back and forth a few times to weaken the metal to the point where if you just stroke the spoon it bends. That’s the whole secret of Uri Geller’s metal bending—getting to the material in advance and preparing it. …

Notices: If there are absolute standards for aesthetics in art, do they also exist in mathematics?

Gardner: Dirac was a great believer in having beautiful equations. “There is no room in mathematics for ugly mathematics,” was, I think, one of his statements. But in physics you can have very beautiful theories that turn out to be totally false. There is a predecessor of string theory called vortex theory, in which all the basic particles were supposed to be knots in the ether. Since there is no friction in the ether, once a little particle would form, it could not lose its shape. I was doing some checking on it, and I ran into statements by top physicists (including James Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, J. J. Thomson, and Albert Michelson) that this theory is too beautiful not to be true.

It turns out that Gardner had a very limited mathematics education — although he learned a lot while writing his column. As a student he studied mathematics only up to calculus.