Category Archives: Web Article Review

Russian nuclear materials

I thought we were told the Soviet nuclear materials were “secured” in the 1990s. I think what that meant is that most of them were moved from surrounding countries to Russia and placed under guard. But first of all, there may have been some unaccounted for. And second of all, it doesn’t much matter if they are under guard in Russia if there are corrupt Russian authorities stealing and trying to sell them, which apparently is what is happening:

Criminal organizations, some with ties to the Russian KGB’s successor agency, are driving a thriving black market in nuclear materials in the tiny and impoverished Eastern European country of Moldova, investigators say. The successful busts, however, were undercut by striking shortcomings: Kingpins got away, and those arrested evaded long prison sentences, sometimes quickly returning to nuclear smuggling, AP found.

Moldovan police and judicial authorities shared investigative case files with the AP in an effort to spotlight how dangerous the nuclear black market has become. They say the breakdown in cooperation between Russia and the West means that it has become much harder to know whether smugglers are finding ways to move parts of Russia’s vast store of radioactive materials — an unknown quantity of which has leached into the black market…

The most serious case began in the spring of 2011, with the investigation of a group led by a shadowy Russian named Alexandr Agheenco, “the colonel” to his cohorts, whom Moldovan authorities believe to be an officer with the Russian FSB, previously known as the KGB. A middle man working for the colonel was recorded arranging the sale of bomb-grade uranium, U-235, and blueprints for a dirty bomb to a man from Sudan, according to several officials. The blueprints were discovered in a raid of the middleman’s home, according to police and court documents.

I always find it depressing to think that after all the heroic efforts and relative success fighting nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism over the decades, it would only take one incident to bring it all crashing down.

There is a slightly comical side to this otherwise terrifying story. All the U.S. headlines are predictably about Islamic State. But in this story, the bad guys are the sellers – Russian and Moldovan gangsters. The buyers were not actual Islamic State, but FBI agents posing as Islamic State.

Dyson, Feynman, Hawking… Carson?

Thinking back to my recent post about Freeman Dyson – a brilliant physicist who has suggested solutions to problems in biology, which biologists refuse to take seriously.

Here is what Richard Feynman has to say about scientists trying to solve puzzles outside their fields:

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter…

In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

Maybe, but is the solution then for everyone to specialize, accept the blinders that specialization causes, and never look beyond them? That can’t be right. The solution has to be for everyone to be trained in a comprehensive, general theory of system science. Then some people remain generalists, while others go on to specialize in a particular type or locality within that larger system theory. Then we would all have a common language and framework for talking to each other.

Take the case of Ben Carson, the “neuroscientist who can’t think“:

When Trump, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says that climate change is a hoax, I can believe it’s a cynical lie pandering to the Republican base, rather than an index of his ignorance.  But when Carson, a retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, denies that climate change is man-made, or calls the Big Bang a fairy tale, or blames gun control for the extent of the Holocaust, I think he truly believes it.

It’s conceivable that the exceptional hand-eye coordination and 3D vision that enabled Carson to separate conjoined twins is a compartmentalized gift, wholly independent of his intellectual acuity. But he could not have risen to the top of his profession without learning the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pre-meds have to take physics), without knowing that life on earth began more than 6,000 years ago (pre-meds have to take biology), without understanding the scientific method (an author of more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals can’t make up his own rules of evidence).  Yet what does it mean to learn such things, if they don’t stop you from spouting scientific nonsense? …

What I don’t get is how his rigorous scientific education and professional training gave Carson’s blind spots a pass.

The Feynman quote is in a Forbes article trying to refute Stephen Hawking talking about technological unemployment. From the Forbes article:

…the rise of the robots cannot possibly make us any poorer than we are now. And that’s in the very worst case: the worst that can possibly happen is that some other people become richer and we get to jog along much as we do now. That’s also the result that is vanishingly unlikely to actually happen. What is far more likely to happen is that we all, jointly, become vastly wealthier…

We have some mixture of human labour and machinery, automation, which produces the things that we consume today. Further, the only useful definition of income is what we’re able to consume. We’re not really interested in whether people have jobs or not, we also don’t care very much about income as income. The root point that we do care about is that people are able to consume things. Shelter, clothing, food, health care, the real point is that people get to eat, sleep under a roof, not be naked (except, of course, when that’s more fun), get treated for what ails them (possibly the result of that fun) and so on. Or, as Adam Smith said, the sole purpose of any production is consumption. It is only consumption, the ability to consume, which is the issue of any importance.

Well, I have a big philosophical problem that the idea that the purpose of life is consumption. What about love, art, achievement, leisure? But let’s stick to science and economics. I don’t have to be Stephen Hawking or even Richard Feynman to give some easy counter-examples. First, if we “produce” more, as measured in dollars changing hands, we can easily be degrading things that aren’t easily measured in dollars, like the atmosphere, forests, and oceans, for example. And eventually, the loss of these ecosystems could bring our civilization to its knees, making us very poor indeed in material terms, no how many dollars we thought we had. That’s a little theoretical, but for recent and obvious cases of technological unemployment, look at the displacement of agricultural workers in the southern U.S. in the early to mid-20th century, and the continuing poverty, ill health, and social problems of their descendants today. Or if you think racism was a larger factor than economic factors there (I think the two are overlapping and intertwined in many ways), look at the factory workers in Appalachia, both black and white, who were displaced by lower cost labor overseas. Again, their descendants are beset by widespread poverty, health and social problems which show no sign of getting better any time soon. So clearly, technological unemployment causes real poverty and suffering for some people, some places, and some times. The difference between these past examples and the AI future might be that it affects most people, most places, all the time, unless we find political solutions to spread the wealth.

And here is Stephen Hawking on exactly that subject in his recent “ask me anything” session:

The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Now, I’m not a famous physicist or even a brain surgeon, but that sounds about right to me.

Uber and car ownership

It appears Uber may be having a small effect on the number of people who want to own cars. This article also says they are working on self-driving cars.

In a recent survey of 2,000 adults ages 18 to 64 conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates, 18% of respondents said they had used Uber in the past year, and of those people, 22% said they are likely to hold off on buying a new car because of the availability of the service.

elephants don’t get cancer

Elephants don’t get cancer. Well, they do, but nowhere near the rates that humans do. There are a few theories – they have better genetic defenses against cancer, they don’t have bad habits like smoking and obesity, and they reproduce throughout their life spans so that evolution selects for traits that keep them healthy late in life. Which reminds me of the weird science fact that humans and two types of whales are the only animals on earth that go through menopause.

Best Steve Spurrier Put-Downs

I don’t normally post this sort of thing, but Steve Spurrier only retires once. I happened to catch the very tail end of the Ol’ Ball Coach era at Florida in person in 1998-99. Without further ado, courtesy of Gatorzone.com, are some of the all-time best Spurrier zingers.

  • “We read in their media guide where no opponent had ever come ‘Between the Hedges‘ and got 50, so we figured we’d do it,” he said. “Pretty nice ball yard, too!”
  • “Can’t spell Citrus without a U and T.”
  • “These kinds of games don’t prove all that much. Just proves we’re better than Kentucky,” Spurrier said after a 66-0 smashing of the Wildcats.
  • “They said it was going to be really loud up there and I have to admit it was — during pre-game warm-ups,” Spurrier crowed after UF took a 35-0 second-quarter lead and went on to beat Tennessee in a No. 2 vs. No. 3 showdown in Knoxville.
  • “Hopefully, LSU’s defensive coordinator won’t be giving any more clinics on how to stop the Gators all next offseason,” Spurrier said after hanging 635 yards on the Tigers in a 56-13 rout, the year after struggling for a season-low 327 in a win at Baton Rouge.
  • Oh, and that one about fire [that destroyed 20 books] at the Auburn library. “Shame of it all, 15 of the books hadn’t even been colored in yet.”

Let’s go over to ESPN for a few more.

  • “I don’t know. I sort of always liked playing them that second game because you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended.”
  • “Why is it that during recruiting season they sign all the great players, but when it comes time to play the game, we have all the great players? I don’t understand that. What happens to them?”
  • “You know what FSU stands for, don’t you? Free Shoes University.”

Ouch! We’ll miss you, coach.

Norbert Wiener

Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

According to The Atlantic,

Wiener is best known as the inventor of “cybernetics,” a fertile combination of mathematics and engineering that paved the way for modern automation and inspired innovation in a host of other fields. He was also one of the first theorists to identify information as the lingua franca of organisms as well as machines, a shared language capable of crossing the boundaries between them…

Wiener refused, for ethical reasons, to accept research contracts from the military or from corporations seeking to exploit his ideas. Since the military and corporations were the main sources of research support, Wiener’s defiance hindered his progress during a period of unprecedented technological advance. Besides nuclear weapons, Wiener was perhaps most worried about the technology he was most directly responsible for developing: automation. Sooner than most, he recognized how businesses could use it at the expense of labor, and how eager they were to do so. “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he wrote in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions…”

The complete synthesis of humans and machines predicted by the transhumanists could represent the vindication of cybernetics—as well as Wiener’s ultimate nightmare. His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility.

World Economic Forecast

The IMF has issued a new World Economic Forecast.

Relative to last year, the recovery in advanced economies is expected to pick up slightly, while activity in emerging market and developing economies is projected to slow for the fifth year in a row, primarily reflecting weaker prospects for some large emerging market economies and oil-exporting countries. In an environment of declining commodity prices, reduced capital flows to emerging markets and pressure on their currencies, and increasing financial market volatility, downside risks to the outlook have risen, particularly for emerging market and developing economies…

the persistently modest pace of recovery in advanced economies and the fifth consecutive year of growth declines in emerging markets suggest that medium-term and long-term common forces are also importantly at play. These include low productivity growth since the crisis, crisis legacies in some advanced economies (high public and private debt, financial sector weakness, low investment), demographic transitions, ongoing adjustment in many emerging markets following the postcrisis credit and investment boom, a growth realignment in China—with important cross-border repercussions—and a downturn in commodity prices triggered by weaker demand as well as higher production capacity.

self driving buses

Here’s another example of self driving vehicles expected in operation within a year or two, not 10-15 years as the pessimists are telling us.

EasyMile has already deployed its low-speed EZ10 shuttles — known as SDVs, or Shared Driverless Vehicles — in closed environments in Finland, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. At one location, the shuttles travel around an amusement park. In another, they take day-trippers from a parking lot to a beachfront. Much like the self-driving cars being developed by Google and other Silicon Valley companies, the vehicles use high-definition internal mapping software to know their routes and various sensors to avoid pedestrians and other obstacles.

But the vehicles will have to be modified to follow the new self-driving handbook from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which is already in force for testing on public roads and still being developed for consumer use.

“In Europe these are truly driverless cars; they don’t even have a steering wheel,” but in California a steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator must be added, Willis said.

self-driving cabs in Japan next year?

We’ve been told self-driving cars might be commercialized on a wide scale by 2025 or 2030. Only in Japan, they are saying 1-5 years. How many years behind is the U.S. typically? Well, if we take the example of high speed rail, Japan started operation in 1964, and projections are that the U.S. will have it…never.

In all seriousness though, this is different. U.S. politicians representing rural areas have power out of proportion to the populations they represent, and because high speed rail can never efficiently serve those sparsely populated rural areas, it is politically nearly impossible. But we have designed our entire country around cars. U.S. politics also support big business – including auto, tech, and insurance companies – and opposes public transportation, all for weird incomprehensible ideological reasons. So the self-driving cars will come.