Brian’s Links 18 May 2012: Medicine, Crime, Climate Change, and Creatures

A cute little jumping robot.

This US wind map is really cool.

Conservation in the Age of Man – its not about protecting the wild anymore – its more like gardening… and using nature to protect people. An interesting shift in philosophy from the Nature Conservancy.

Mind over matter: paralyzed patients moving robotic arms with only their minds.  In the video, a locked-in patient uses her mind via the robotic arm to reach for her coffee and drink it for the first time in 15 years.

First it’s shocking and horrible (UC Davis) and then it’s normal, barely even news. From last month. Didn’t get enough coverage.

How to deal with psychopaths, using Girardian theory.  I especially like the “gray rock” strategy.

Brain injuries are very bad things. In this new study deceased US military veterans were autopsied and found to have similar brain damage to athletes such as football players.

This story is grotesquely unjust. An elderly man accidentally sets off his medic alarm. Cops come to man’s home.  He informs them it was an accident. Cops shoot man dead. Can you guess the victim’s skin color?

The dollar is being slowly, intentionally, steadily devalued, as anyone who has watched gas or gold (or any) prices might suspect. No conspiracy, just economics – its the best the Fed thinks they can do to keep the monetary system stable.

Yes, your dog does need plastic surgery. No, the starving children don’t need food.

Three fun climate-change-related links.  One on Washington D.C.’s warmest winter ever (I was there in late December, and it was quite pleasant), another on the record-breakingly warm March, and the last imagining San Francisco as an island after the sea level has risen. The time frame on SF Island is totally unrealistic (IPCC estimate is less than 3 feet in the next century, not 3 feet per year – see Wikipedia), but people like to imagine disasters.Interesting linked info too.

And one for any skeptics: the US military thinks climate change is real.

What bacteria can survive 1000 times more radiation than a human? Also known as Conan the Bacterium? Well Deinococcus radiodurans, of course. Luckily, its also friendly.

The RoboBonobo. Not only does it look freaky, it really just is. It’s basically an ape-controlled drone (well, humans are apes too… so it’s a non-human-ape-controlled drone…) armed with a squirt gun. Yeah, next we’ll have them invading and bombing foreign countries! Well, maybe we could just keep this one for fun, for now, at least.

Some very alien places on Earth. Very interesting pictures.

An enormously giant bunny. The world’s biggest. Bigger than small children. About four and a half feet and 50 pounds of bunny.

Lastly, happy bouncing cows.

Brian’s Links 12 May 2012: Science, Space, Cardinals, and Ennui

Robotic support brings freedom to paraplegics – Tek RMD. More really cool technology.

A Stanford scientist conducts an experiment on himself, producing “an integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) [that] combines cutting-edge scientific fields such as genomics (study of one’s DNA), metabolomics (study of metabolism), and proteomics (study of proteins).” And he discovers a link between viral infections and type-2 diabetes, among other things.

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Paypal, Solar City, Tesla Motors, and Space X, wants to save the world. He wants to get humans off-planet, on Mars, to “back up the biosphere.” Sounds like a good idea to me. Here’s a fascinating interview from CBS’s 60 Minutes.

A “seed vault for culture.” From the folks at The Long Now Foundation.

Yes, there are even invasive plant species in Antarctica.

George Monbiot tells us what he really thinks about Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Hint: it includes the word “psychopath.”

According to these guys women can be Catholic Cardinals. How interesting.

Panera restaurants make paying for food voluntary. And it works! At CatholicMoralTheology.com and USA Today.

The South Korean scientists who faked his human-cloning data is off to redeem his reputation. By trying to clone a Woolly Mammoth.

So the Galactic Empire in Star Wars has leadership troubles. The Sith really need to work on their “people skills.” Here’s how you can learn from their failures.

Grass fed cows! They still exist? Yes! And they can be environmentally friendly? Well, yes. Moo.

The NSA is watching you. And You. And you, and you, and you, and…

Okay, near the end of the links I try to be funny. Here’s research about sexually rejected fruit flies turning to alcohol to cheer themselves up. No joke! Gives a new meaning to “bar flies.”

Lastly, Henri, Cat of Ennui.

Two Amazing Innovations for Persons with Disabilities

Technology can do some amazing things, and today I came across two big stories.

For the first, imagine being both blind and deaf. How incredibly isolating. This glove cannot remove those burdens, but it does allow deafblind people to send and receive text messages, thus permitting communication with people who do not know the intricate signals necessary to communicate with deafblind persons. What a fantastic technology – this is what tech is all about.

(h/t to God and the Machine)

The second story is perhaps even more incredible: the restoration of sight to people who are blind.People are calling it a bionic eye, and, well… IT IS! It’s fantastic. The field of vision restored is miniscule (the size of a CD at arm’s length), but the proof of concept in this experimental implant is mind boggling. The chip turns light into nerve impulses. This is full neural-electronic interface, which, while it has been done before in various contexts, is becoming more and more effective and miniaturized.

In this video a prototype from 2008 is tested:

Now, this technology has potential for weirdness. With modification, the image, for example, could be fed to outsiders, not just the implantee’s optic nerve, so you could literally see through someone else’s eyes (this has been done before with cats). And the reverse, perhaps false signals could be put into the chip, or even messages written directly into neural patterns (talk about a personal text message). And the list could go on and on.

But for now, it is just plain amazing.

Brian’s Links 16 April 2012: Can You Find a Theme?

“Riding the Booster.” This video is simply amazing – the solid rocket booster goes up and it comes back down again. I must say, I got a bit dizzy after booster separation. But worth the ride!

Benedict XVI has been dubbed “The Green Pope” for his environmental concern. I like it, and not just because my last name is Green. Here’s a report from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Climate Change.

Ever wondered if your brain was messing with your ability to judge and reason correctly? Well, it is: here is a list of cognitive biases. And the bias I address in some of my research, teleological bias, isn’t even on this immense list. (Teleological bias is the tendency to infer purposes where there are none, e.g., the lightning striking your dog really was a random accident, not because you named your dog Zeus.)

The thought experiment of “ethical autocorrect.”

So, all your traceable purchases are being traced and compiled in myriad computers.  The easy way to stop store-centered ones is to pay cash (like a criminal) and never use those store “clubs.” But the internet is tracking you too! Here are some more sophisticated responses for the internet. And if you tell your Facebook friends to warn them, it just gives the trackers more info on you!

The Nobel Peace Prize committee is under investigation for straying from the prize’s original purpose…

Contagious twitching. A very strange case.

Muggers just need a nice dinner and some conversation.

The case of the Millionaire Metaphysician. For more info see Ammonius.org.

The Guerrilla Grafters, surreptitiously turning non-fruiting city trees into fruiting ones. I like it.

Is it wrong to father 400 children through sperm donation? (And if not, then where is the cutoff? Is there one?) Because of sperm banks, some guys are “fathering” (in a biological sense only) an immense number of children.  This is not insignificant; this is the human gene pool being altered here, not to mention people’s lives.

English Muslim baroness warns Christians to stand up for their religion.

And how to prove the absurdity of the Supreme Court case “Citizens United”? Colbert is on it. Because Mitt Romney is a serial killer. Corporation are people. Bain Capital repeatedly bought and broke up corporations, killing them. Therefore Romney’s a serial killer. I love absurdity. This link to the Colbert Report will get you the video in case the embedded video below has failed. (The embed is a mirror copy of the original (removed for some kind of YouTube terms violation) and likely won’t be alive for long.) This is a few months old, but still just as pertinent.

Brian’s Links 2 April 2012: Robots, Romney, and More Robots

These little robots are just waiting for Skynet to give them guidance. Someday I am going to have to write a more extensive post on the philosophy (and theology) behind these kinds of inventions, but for now I’ll just say that the militarized versions can’t be too far off. Hang a pistol and camera on them and you’ve got a fleet of unpleasant little drones. They remind me of the mechanical hounds in Fahrenheit 451, except that these fly.

Hey, turns out multicellular life is not so hard to get after all. Just repeatedly select for the yeast colonies that settle fastest and voila! Multicellular yeast. One blogger doesn’t like it though.  If multicellular life is so easy to get, he reasons, then what was once a serious obstacle to the evolution of spacefaring intelligence has been easily past. Which means there must be something else causing Fermi’s Paradox… such as intelligent species always destroying themselves.  I have previously discussed “The Great Filter” here, but I’m not as pessimistic as the fellow at Marginal Revolution. We still have a pretty good chance, I think. Though the robots above are not helping my case right now.

Antibiotic-free meat still has drug-resistant bacteria in it, including deadly MRSA. The bacteria don’t seem to follow our ideas about what they ought to be infecting. And you thought meat was supposed to be safe!

Fascinating article about UX, the “Urban eXperiment” in Paris. A literal underground movement – way ahead of the police, and luckily, also not too dangerous, doing such dastardly deeds as sneaking in and repairing the broken clock in the French Pantheon.

Vibrations on rockets make seeing difficult. An expensive problem and a $5 solution. Good thinking.

Another from Be Scofield at Tikkun: the new atheists and racism.

Old news, but in case you missed it: Romney is not concerned about the very poor. Dana Dillon at Catholic Moral Theology takes Romney down, at least from a Catholic perspective: “for Catholics, being unconcerned with the very poor is not an option.”

And (besides the above disturbing comment) why is Mitt Romney so unappealing? Well, it could be that he’s (like) a robot…

Penultimately, an atheist in Texas thinks about suing to get a Nativity scene removed. But he discovers he’s going blind, cannot pay for treatment, and so has to give up pursuing the case. And then the town Christians come to his aid, donating to help him pay his rent and get the medical treatment he needs.

And lastly, the lil’ Skynet robots play the James Bond theme.  I bet if they got together with the Stayin’ Alive Petman they could really do something interesting.

Human Sacrifice, Your New Name Is “Reality TV”: Christianity, Rene Girard, and The Hunger Games

When I first heard of The Hunger Games they sounded repulsive to me. Teenagers engaged in death-matches for public sport and food? Not what I go for.

Why did I think I disliked The Hunger Games? It is because I thought it would just be a glorification of violence at the expense of youth, in a muddle of ambiguous morality.  I admit it, I’m a sucker for moral clarity (probably because I deal with muddles so often, clarity is nice once in a while).

But then I saw this video by Fr. Robert Barron (via Mark Shea) where he makes some stunning insights by applying Rene Girard (one of the last great French literary theorists, philosophers, and theologians still living – AND I had lunch with him once!) to The Hunger Games.

It all comes back to the scapegoating and sacrifice of the one or few for the sake of the many. Of all the odd and disturbing human universals, scapegoating and sacrifice is one of the most horrible. The Aztecs did it. Mayans, Incas, ancient Near-Eastern religions did it. The ancient Greeks (the story of Theseus and the Minotaur) and Romans (with gladiators and minorities), the Nazis, Communists, utilitarians* (oo, cheap shot!), new atheists, “the 99%”, and various religions, nations, political parties, and cultures, and on and on across literature, myth, geography and history – it is everywhere. It’s an equal-opportunity corrupter. The Hunger Games just continues the storyline. It intuitively makes sense because it comes from who we are.

Morality and Technology

Some kinds of problems can be solved in two ways: a moral solution and/or a technological solution.

Take global warming.  If we wanted to reduce global warming we could either change our technology – which is very carbon intensive – or change our behavior – which is very carbon intensive.

For example, cars only burn gasoline and make CO2 if we drive them. Our light bulbs only use coal-fed power if we turn them on. Rainforests only release their stored CO2 if we burn them down.

Those are all behaviors which we could control if we wanted to.  But self-control is hard. So the much easier solution is the technological one.

Hydropower dams! Wind farms!  Solar cells, geothermal, fusion power! Electric cars, electric buses, electric trains. And on and on. All good technologies, and we need them to replace the older carbon-intensive techs that we need to retire.

But in this quest to save the world from climate change, technology is only one component of the solution. If we continue to solve all our problems via technology, what will happen to our behavior? We will grow weak-willed. We will think that whenever there is a problem we could solve it if only we had an engineer to come and save us. Thus we forget the fact that we also have a say in this as individuals, in how we act. What about ourselves?

One of the greatest challenges posed when I taught an ethics of engineering course last year was from a student who said we should all just get off the grid. We had been talking about cooperation in evil and he took the teaching to heart – he wanted no part of cooperating in climate change. We could end CO2 production now if people all just stopped using CO2 intensive power sources. And of course he was right – but that is a really hard thing to do. Our social institutional structures are not set up to let us out of the grip of CO2. To name just one, the entire interstate highway system is against us. And he was only one voice in a class of 3o.

But the challenge is real. To many problems, there are moral or technical solutions (bioethics seems particularly full of them). The technical solutions are often easier and so we run to them to save us so that we don’t have to actually change our behavior or make hard moral choices.

The philosopher Hans Jonas warned of going down this route where technological power saves us instead of morality. He warned that as we grow in power, we can begin to lose a sense of how it ought to be used. As our power grows, our ethics diminish. And soon we have nuclear weapons, a massive extinction of species , and global warming and we wonder what to do – because we’ve forgotten how we are supposed to act and who we are supposed to be.

So while the technical solutions are tempting, we must not succumb to letting only them save us.  We need our self-control too. We need to know why we are living and what we are here for, and how to act based on who we are.  And in contemporary culture, those are hard questions to ask, much less answer.

(H/T to my engineering and social justice class at SCU and to Thomas at God and the Machine for making me think about this stuff)

Brian’s Links 20 March 2012: Invisibility and Environmentalism

The invisible car.  Really its a zero-emissions vehicle, the LED invisibility is just an analogy. Two technological feats for one car!

And while we are on the subject of invisibility, check out artist Liu Bolin hiding in plain sight in New York City and other places around the world.

Yes, court-ordered forced abortions are still illegal in the United States, though this case had to go to the appeals court…

For Catholics in the Occupy movement, a new gathering point on the web. More info here at the ever-informative catholicmoraltheology.com.

This looks like a really great new wind power technology. They’re “windstalks.” Just swaying in the breeze.

Here is a great story about how people are getting to the bottom of where their meat comes from and how it is raised.  One of the farms mentioned, Soul Food Farm in Vacaville, CA, is a splendid little place with tasty free-range eggs. My family and I are lucky to have access to farms like this. Free-range is a great way to go.

Will there be moral machines?

Portland’s public toilets are metal shacks with almost no privacy.  They are cold and uninviting. And they are proving to be the best public toilets ever invented.

And finally, a man trying to save his island nation from rising sea-levels. President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives (who was unfortunately recently ousted). Turns out that environmentally “invisible” car above can’t come too soon – it and everything else we need to set our ourselves right.

Brian’s Links 15 March 2012: Money, Meat, and Marvelous Animals

I think this crow is having fun.

Guess what? Ugandans really hate the Kony 2012 campaign. “Towards the end of the film, the mood turned more to anger at what many people saw as a foreign, inaccurate account that belittled and commercialised their suffering, as the film promotes Kony bracelets and other fundraising merchandise, with the aim of making Kony infamous. One woman I spoke to made the comparison of selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11.” Here’s a good resource for further investigations

The “avoid ghetto” button for your new map directions might also provide a “divert path to nearest advertiser” feature.

Is Distributism a Form of Capitalism? Depends what you mean by “capitalism.”

So, our congress folk are not exactly like the rest of us: “Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500.”

Addressing the issue of whether science and religion are at war, and additionally, whether your story’s characters are unrealistic due to your lack of interest in people you do not like. Written by science fiction author Mike Flynn.

It’s great that this new material can soak CO2 out of the air, but the idea of artificial trees I think is a little too C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength.

Should we raise the human IQ?

Greek parents abandoning their kids in the streets.

Ever wonder if you should terraform that planet over there? Well, Wikipedia can tell you whether it’s okay or not.

Why are Americans eating less meat? A 12% reduction in 5 years is a pretty big drop. Maybe it’s because of the foaming exploding pig poop problem?

Vegetarians, you are hereby morally obligated to eat laboratory grown meat.

Tuberculosis with no cure, at all. Completely drug resistant.

Honeybee colony collapse disorder may have a culprit: a tiny parasitic fly laying its maggots in live honeybees. San Francisco State University professor cracks the case! Here’s the free paper! (I love free papers.)

A story about getting your email account hacked and losing everything.

It’s like news from The Onion, but it’s The Onion Dome.

From the real Onion: Iran expresses concern that US may be building its 8500^th nuclear weapon.

And lastly, “A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.” Don’t mess with lions fighting crime, seriously. Awesome.

"We'll take it from here."

Brian’s Links 6 March 2012: Robots, Colleges, and Infanticide

The above video is so that you know what the attack robots will look like, how fast you will need to run, and also so you can send your thanks to DARPA in advance.

Recent exciting ethics news? Infanticide advocated (call it “after-birth abortion”) in the Journal of Medical Ethics (Free access! Quick!). It made a big splash, not only in the blogs (see here for some responses) but in the papers too. The basic argument is that if you are going to kill small humans, it doesn’t really matter whether they are inside their mothers or not. And given their premises, their logic is relatively sound. But I do not agree with their premises. As a matter of fact, I think their argument makes it reasonable to kill anyone, but that is for another post…

And for some completely peaceful and life-affirming bioethics, try this Jain bioethics conference at Claremont.

No pulse? No problem! Turns out artificial hearts work better if they don’t beat. So don’t get freaked out when you meet living people with no pulse. They are not zombies (probably… I make no guarantees).

Even parodies of Farmville are addictive. The sad story of the game “Cow Clicker.” No joke!

Germain Grisez, conservative moral theologian and friend of the environment.

A new blog on religion (Catholicism) and technology. I’ll be keeping an eye on it since I love mixing tech, religion, and philosophy.

Two completely different-and-yet-similar colleges: Wyoming Catholic College specializing in the great books in the great outdoors and John Paul the Great Catholic University specializing in media and technology. Both are new in the last 10 years. There is a widespread dissatisfaction in the more traditional branches of American Catholicism with Catholic higher ed. And they are creating their own institutions to fill their need. Fascinating stuff. Watch this video on WCC to see.