Make Space not War – Why Apollo 11 Matters 40 Years On

July 20th, 2009 2 comments or # link to posted by david

[ NASA have restored the moon landing video. Slightly odd in a way, because part of the appeal of the live transmissions was their distinctive poor quality compared to the film flown back later. They were really far away and the crackle and hiss created an electrifying sense of excitement. ]

Update: One of the bizarre things about the Internet is that despite its promise of real time media, refreshing a text based web site is a lot less interesting than watching TV when it comes to breaking news. I was looking for something online which captured the excitement of the moon landings in real time, and not a Twitter feed. SMS is less dramatic than what we had 40 years ago. It turns out that Jason Kottke has created a fantastic site which is showing the moon landings as they happened 40 years later to the second. a simple a powerful idea: watch it here.

Why does it matter that we went to the moon?

Did we really ‘come in peace’ by sending people on a purposeless voyage riding incredibly expensive, Nazi designed, bomb rockets, in an inter-empire pissing contest, while millions starved?

Yes.

Human beings are hard wired to murder each other. We are tribal, hairless apes whose aggressive tendencies, when transferred from the sticks and stones of the ancient African savannah to modern industrialized nations, threaten the atomic slaughter of millions with a single phone call. And despite our species-wide back slapping about human capacity for caring, we are selective about who we care for. Just as we feed dogs dozens of other mammals during their lifetime, but would go to jail if we fed a dog to one of them, our capacity for empathy is selective and over-rated. Many of the people that suffer daily in poor regions have been treated worse a pet dog; they are like the food we give to our pets, something we don’t think about because they are physically distant.

Sending people to the moon helps quell the most egregious effects of our instincts. It is the most notable thing hairless apes have done since shedding hair because it places our notion of drive and purpose outside of the planet, and therefore allows anyone on the planet to share equally. It symbolizes our ability to channel aggression to conquer space rather than each other and a creates a tangible purpose that is independent of terrestrial geography.

If space missions allow people to behave as one looking out, from some perspectives, they are all that we have done looking in from outside. An alien staring at our planet for the last 4 billion years from the remote vacuum of space might see nothing more than the silent blip blip as a handful of people left earth and went to the nearest ball of rock and back, more than a generation ago. And 40 years later – nothing.

That blip blip, created all of the challenge of war, all of the excitement of weapons and all of the triumph of victory – without the killing, something that resonates on a personal, sentimental level.

When I was 3, my grandfather met Neil Armstrong and gave me his autograph. It started a lifelong obsession with space technology which gave me the same instinctive visceral kick as toy gun. I now have an 18 month old son and I’ll be able to give him something other than toy soldiers to play with and something more to aim for than those blips.

What could possibly be more important?

More of the videos here.

2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: space

Darwin in the Financial Markets

July 19th, 2009 8 comments or # link to posted by david

If you can overcome the fact that Niall Ferguson seems to have slowed his metabolism to alter his rate of speaking to avoid any exertion whatsoever in the summer heat that this talk was delivered, then it’s interesting – interesting because it is dull and obvious but wrong.

Darwinian Natural selection takes a minute to grasp and a lifetime to misunderstand, as Ferguson demonstrates – his premise is that markets might be Darwinian. Perhaps the reason he is appears so cautious, is that accepting that greed driven markets are Darwinian is one step away from politically unacceptable Social Darwinism.

Maybe it was for this reason that Paul Kedrosky originally put up the clip with the disclaimer: “I’m skittish about the over-application of neo-Darwinian thinking to everything in sight , but this talk by Niall Ferguson is worth a look”

Since neo-Darwinism refers to a strict interpretation of Darwin’s exact description of Evolution, Niall Ferguson’s market evolution is nothing of the sort – it could equally be saying that markets are Lamarckian and not Darwinian, since successful market strategies are passed on during the lifetime of those who develop them.

This is the problem with applying Darwin to everything. Clearly all order is ultimately self-emergent, it is a meta law that must therefore apply to every collection of interacting systems but unless you describe the mechanism you aren’t saying much.

For example, Darwinism requires a finite environment (creating the constraints for competition), mutation (to create new things to select) and inheritance (to create a cycle for rules of selection to apply). The rules of selection themselves are defined by the interaction of a specific system and specific environment. Capitalist markets are based upon growth markets where supply and demand are elastic and where advantage comes from invention – or ideas. The genes are memes and there is no proof yet that memetic Darwinism is more than analogy.

Ferguson is surprised that when he showed a slide of Dawkins and Gould to an audience of bankers at a conference organized by Goldman Sachs, not a single person could identify them. However, Ferguson may be able to recognize evolutionists and evolution in the colloquial sense but not Darwin and his theory. Understanding the exact mechanism of evolution is the contribution that Darwin made and is often misunderstood because the idea of natural selection is so easy to grasp in a general form.

That markets are Darwinian in the colloquial sense of survival of the fittest, is obvious but unfashionable. That markets are truly Darwinian means that they are not Lamarckian and that a business advantage cannot be transferred during the lifetime of the system that Darwinian rules are operating on – that would be remarkable. Just as there is some debate about whether memes are really Darwinian, its not clear that markets are, but not for the reasons that Ferguson argues.

[ I suspect that memes are in fact really Darwinian and that the way that the Lamarckian problem is removed is to figure out what the equivalent of an organism is for memes.

Organisms themselves are persistent features which remain after all their constituent molecules are replaced through eating and pooping. In this way, organisms are actually like ideas or rather a specific message containing ideas.

In the generalized world of any type of idea or information, memes are ideas contained in messages and memetic organisms are a specific example of a message, for example in the binary encoding of a computer, the pen marks in a letter or a business transaction.

The life cycle that makes this non Lamarckian is the successful or unsuccessful application or transmission of an idea or collection of inseparable ideas from one message encoding to another. This could be from a computer to a print out or even a collection of neurons in someone's head, in every case the message idea is contained within a new message medium.

Reproduction of animals through transfer of an idea of how to build that animal (contained in its DNA) from one animal to its offspring is a specific case of memetic transfer. ]

via Paul Kedrosky

8 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: business

Full Richard Feynman Messenger Lecture Series

July 17th, 2009 7 comments or # link to posted by david

My hobby is Physics, specifically information theory. Not a popular pastime to have, perhaps, but my Dad is a physicist and the interest rubs off.

One thing I’ve learned is that to get simple explanations for things, counter to popular belief it’s better to get the view of the best physicists than the best communicators. Richard Feynman was both.

There are many Feynman clips around, but Bill Gates has spent significant time and some of his fortune tracking down rights for a famous series of 7 lectures by Feynman at Cornell University in 1964, called the Messenger lectures. They have been put up for free at the Microsoft Research Web site, as part of project Tuva, with full transcripts and interactive features.

The extras are thorough and useful for this type of subject matter, but the format is very like an old school interactive CD-ROM, where the interface re-invents the wheel and omits standard functionality such as the ability to embed.

[ BTW - these Microsoft Silverlight powered videos were almost impossible to watch for me, due to stopping and starting. Like the bad old days before Youtube used flash embeds and web based video suddenly seemed good enough. Silverlight is, in theory solid, so what's up here? Is it just me? ]

Watch them here.

7 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: science

Jackson Dies, Media Industry Rejoices While Pretending Not To – oh, and how to nail your Moonwalk

June 26th, 2009 10 comments or # link to posted by david

[Mass Moonwalks have already been organized in London and Vienna. Here is an instructional video so that you can nail it and join in.]

Jackson was weirder than Elvis and sold more records, ergo instant media bonanza and Internet meltdown. Nothing like a premature celebrity death to keep the ailing newspaper industry from its long overdue one or the Internet from spreading sanity-threatening, pandemic memetic flu.

You see, the Internet is a giant pile of interconnected tubes which has the principal function of amplifying celebrity and thus revealing that the vast majority of humans are sheep. An entire country twice the size of France may be on the brink of revolution but no matter, Michael Jackson has died and the heat generated by overloaded server farms threatens accelerated global warming. Google originally thought that the number of queries it was receiving today was a Denial of Service Attack.

Anyone dying is sad, but as Andrew Sullivan points out, sadder than Michael Jackson’s death, was the normal life that was stolen from him from childhood. It’s the only sensible point I’ve seen today, other than Gawker which taking its traditional ‘meta’ stance and instead of morbidly following the Jackson wake is doing an autopsy on the media coverage itself. Gawker points out that in country where libel laws don’t extend to the dead, having been charged on 4 counts of child molestation is not going to make this pretty in the long run.

This is a rare opportunity (the last one was possibly Princess Diana’s fatal car crash) to look at what happens when ordinary humans temporarily become weirder than Jackson himself, with emotion either genuinely felt and therefore often hysterical, or cynically milked and therefore deplorable. The lasting story here will be the supra-normal reaction of the fans and of the media.

Here is a small roundup of media absurdity so you can switch off your radio, unplug the TV at the socket and tape up the windows for the next 48 hours.

The BBC, under the headline: “Africa cries for Michael Jackson“. is reporting that Michael Jackson’s brother, Marlon, is planning to develop a hybrid slave history and Jackson Five theme park in Nigeria, where, In Lagos, a Radio Continental presenter broke into uncontrollable weeping live on air and her co-presenter had to take over.

Back in Britain, the BBC has some choice quotes from Jackson’s UK bodyguard:

“Everyone thought he was this weird freak, but when you’re with him he’s as normal as everyone else“. Is he blind? “We used to dress him up and sneak him out of his hotel room and do normal things in shops“. Lets be straight, playing ‘lets do normal things in shops’ is not a normal game.

The Tampa Liberal Examiner claims that:

“‘Weird Al’ Yankovic wouldn’t be ‘Weird Al’ without those infectious Jackson parodies“, missing the obvious point that Weird Al would have been, in fact, a whole lot weirder if he’d done a straight up imitation.

Zeenews India wins the worst headline of the day award with a painful attempt at poetic metaphor:

“‘Moon walk’ into dreadful shadows”

while the San Francisco Chronicle wins the most pretentious, staying on the Moonwalk theme:

“…billions of humans disagree about the nature of God. But everyone knows what the moonwalk is.”

The sycophant award goes to Deepak ‘I knew Michael personally, we were best friends’ Chopra on Beliefnet:

“I sat with him for hours while he dreamily wove Aesop-like tales about animals“. Not something I’d be able to sit through without narcotics, personally.

The Web and Twitter are awash with adolescent ‘nobody understands how I feel’ self-indulgence so I’ve picked out only one sample via WJZ Baltimore which is no more atypical or less bland than thousands of others:

“I was @ a concert and I was a contestant at all Michael Jackson look-a-like contest! it will hard to cope with his death!!” Oh well, we still have his double. Seriously though, what kind of sadist organizes a Michael Jackson lookalike contest for kids?

My favorite quote so far, however, is this one from Hitfix:

“It’s always the little strange details about someone that super-famous that stick out“.

What, tiny details like him changing from a six foot African American man to a bad wax works’ white version of Diana Ross with a child’s voice?

10 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: media

Edge of Darkness

June 24th, 2009 comment or # link to posted by david

Watch Edge of darkness 1 in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

From the comments, Jon picks edge of darkness in his favorite TV from the past.

“One of a long series of big drama serials that pretty much sustained British TV in the post-Play for Today years. It fed straight into the nuclear paranoia instilled from a childhood where we subconsciously listened for the early warning sirens. ”

Here it is on Veoh (a login allows you to watch it and parts 2-4 in full).

comment » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: drama