Featured Find: Lake Vostok!

Russian scientists have acheived what's being called the moon landing of our generation:

MOSCOW — In the coldest spot on the earth’s coldest continent, Russian scientists have reached a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario after spending a decade drilling through more than two miles of solid ice, the scientists said Wednesday.

A statement by the chief of the Vostok Research Station, A. M. Yelagin, released by the director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, said the drill made contact with the lake water at a depth of 12,366 feet. As planned, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole 100 to 130 feet pushing drilling fluid up and away from the pristine water, Mr. Yelagin said, and forming a frozen plug that will prevent contamination. Next Antarctic season, the scientists will return to take samples of the water.

The first hint of contact with the lake was on Saturday, but it was not until Sunday that pressure sensors showed that the drill had fully entered the lake. Lake Vostok, named after the Russian research station above it, is the largest of more than 280 lakes under the miles-thick ice that covers most of the Antarctic continent, and the first one to have a drill bit break through to liquid water from the ice that has kept it sealed off from light and air for somewhere between 15 million and 34 million years.

Hobbes: The American West and 21st-Century America

"Thomas Hobbes" by Leon Douglas

<cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

In my last post on this topic, we got through Hobbes as relative and Hobbes as overstated. To continue our discussion:

Claim 3: There is a significant difference between political and personal liberty.

Lockeans love to claim themselves the true lovers of liberty, but their liberty is political by nature: the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to rebel against an unjust leader, etc. Hobbesians are most concerned with the first of Locke's three inalienable rights: the right to a peaceful existence, wherein personally-meaningful activities can be pursued. That is to say, peace and stability trump discussions of essentials. As long as I am effectively free, that is all that counts. Who cares about the structure of our legislative process or checks-and-balances or bipartisanship or whatever so long as I am able to pursue freely my chosen career of saxophonist?

That is not to say structural issues don't matter, but they should be seen as means to an end rather than as ends themselves.

Claim 4: The freest nations are the ones with the most effective court, police, and military systems.

By "most effective" I certainly do not mean most expensive; nor do I mean largest or most powerful. If one dedicated protector of peace is enough to prevent Precinct 13 from being overtaken by those who threaten the social contract, then that dedicated protector is more than enough.

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Hobbes: Authority

legitimate rule

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.>

Since Rufus and Jason have covered Hobbes in such excellent detail thus far, my contribution to this discussion will be more about tying up loose ends.

As a student, I read Hobbes four different times in four different contexts for four different unrelated courses, and that's how I feel Hobbes is best approached: through a plurality of heterodox methodologies and interpretive structures. We'll attempt to do that below.

Claim 1: "Hobbesian" is a relative term.

A question at the center of any discussion on Hobbes is often: what does the eponym "Hobbesian" mean, essentially? Jason made reference to Wittgenstein in his most recent post on the topic. Rufus asked the question non-rhetorically. I'll expand on the discussion of semantics and claim that the best definitions of "Hobbesian" stand in contrast to other prevailing ideas of the period.

Hobbes is usually studied in relation to the positions of Locke and Rousseau. Regarding Hobbes and Locke, Hobbes felt that universal surrender to an absolute sovereign is the only way to secure civil society, while Locke's political thought went on to serve as a primary influence for the American democracy. In contrast to Rousseau's optimism about human nature - that men are inherently good - Hobbes argued that men are inherently weak; in contrast to Rousseau's belief in the noble savage and the morally-cancerous influence of civil society, Hobbes believed that the state of nature was a state of perpetual suffering and that only the stability of civil society could foster human flourishing.

These two ideas: (1) the Hobbesian positive (commonly called pessimism about human nature); and (2) the Hobbesian normative (the necessity of a strong, central authority) comprise an internally-consistent school of thought that stands with Lockeanism and Rousseauvianism as one of the three pillars of social contract theory. The debates hashed out centuries ago between these three thinkers still rage strong today.

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In Case You Decided to Watch Football Instead

Two minutes ago I was staring at the all-important Lions-Saints matchup down on the Bayou, an evening of passive adrenalin infusion ahead of me when I remembered the other game being televised tonight. Thanks to someone in my neighborhood providing unsecured Wi-Fi I am now at the dining room table, ready to hunker down with the last six of our highly-funded and eminently-talented GOP nomination pool. It is 8:58pm; I’ve got an oversized cup o’ joe in my belly and my blood is suddenly supercharged thanks to the sparks flying at me from the socket where I was hastily plugging in the old Hewlett-Packard. Add to this my uncanny political judgment, unclouded by any trace of actual knowledge, and I am ready for two uninterrupted hours of Yahoo-powered policy and bickering.

All right so I just missed the opening question because I had to go let out my coffee. Mitt Romney is talking about…ah yes, it’s nice that our economy has been creating lots of new jobs but of course Obama is not to be credited. He hasn’t yada yada, his policies yada yada… Great start Mitt, you’re debating someone who is not even in the room.

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Regulations Kill Industries: Porn Edition

Did social conservatives think of this?

This week, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched a new war against porn’s potentially reckless ways, proposing a strict initiative that would require male porn stars to wear condoms during vaginal and anal intercourse.

Since California is one of two states in which porn is legal (the other is, only recently, New Hampshire), could this be the end of porn?

Immediately, the porn world was up in arms over the initiative. “Hey, dicks, it’s really quite simple,” says Jeremy. “We don’t mind wearing rubbers, but no matter how you slice it, the viewers don’t want to see them.”

“The fact that these workers’ health and safety has been neglected is a very dangerous situation,” AHF president Michael Weinstein tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a matter of fairness. Why is this the only industry not afforded protection when they go to work?”...

...But Cal/OSHA and the AIDS Health Foundation insist the initiative—a stricter version of the state law—will be easier to enforce on a smaller scale. They need 200,000 signatures by June 5 to add the measure to the November 2012 presidential ballot in L.A. County. Weinstein is confident they’ll amass the votes, since they easily collected 70,901 signatures for the citywide measure. The initiative argues that the adult entertainment industry should have to comply with the same laws as any other private employer in California. Just as construction workers are required to wear hard hats on site, porn stars should have to wear rubbers on set. Cal/OSHA even mandates that porn bosses provide employees exposed to blood-borne pathogens (seminal and vaginal fluids) with dental dams, gloves, and eye protection.

This all raises the question: If condoms are enough to drive viewers away, who’s going to pay money to watch people go at it while looking like CDC agents?

It's a brilliant plan, if it is a plan.

How Do You Translate 'Wa'?

I remember talking with Billy, a guy from Vancouver who married a Japanese girl and was living in Fukushima. His son was a few years older than mine, and had so far survived what concerned me now about my two-year-old speaking much more Japanese, at a higher level, than English. Yes, he was only two, but this was the kind of thing I’d rather tackle sooner than later.

‘Kids pick up on these things,’ he assured me. ‘The pronunciation, the details.’ But what he said next gave me pause. ‘They say a kid will keep developing that language base until he’s ten or twelve years old.’ Which made me wonder: first, what if all of a sudden I turn around and my son is a teenager and doesn’t have that solid English foundation? And second, are we still going to be living in Japan ten years down the road?

This was in October. In December I brought my family to the States for Christmas, and after four weeks my son returned to Japan speaking better English than Japanese. It didn’t take long for his Japanese to catch up again, and I redoubled my efforts to not only keep him speaking English but to constantly add new words and expressions to his repertoire. (After years of teaching English as a foreign language it is too easy to fall into the habit of slowing down, and dumbing down, one’s own speech.)

This Spring we spent three months in the US, and in September we moved here for good (for now). Naturally, ironically, my concerns have shifted from my son’s English capacity to his ability not just to hang on to his Japanese but to continue advancing it.

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O Seasteaders!

The tetrahedral floating city of Triton, designed by Buckminster Fuller for Tokyo BayAdmittedly, I subscribe to the Seasteading Institute newsletter. Patri Friedman is an interesting dude, to say the least, and I am a futurist. The Seasteading Institute has some of the brightest minds in the world behind its cause. Today's newsletter read thusly: 

Greetings Friends of The Seasteading Institute,

As protests spread across the USA, Congress approval ratings hit all-time lows, and the European Union contemplates dissolution, interest in seasteading is higher than ever. There's never been a greater need for an alternative to today's inadequate governments.

It's unfortunate that such gloomy news fuels our project, but the future is bright. The whole world will benefit when seasteading societies pioneer new forms of government, new policies, and new institutions. It is finally time for humanity to discover what government always should have been - innovative, effective, responsive, diverse, and benevolent.

With your support, The Seasteading Institute is enabling the next generation of government technology. We thank you, and thank the entrepreneurs, investors, volunteers and others who work on this cause all over the world.

Sincerely,

Michael Keenan

President of The Seasteading Institute

They've kind of got a point, don't they? Has government ever been less effective? And less reviled? And has an effective alternative ever been less quioxotic than it is now, in the age of information technologies and mass cooperation?

And In Disappointing Tech Nerd News...

That's not a misplaced modifier.

If you're like I am, you often look up words you don't know right after you read them on a web page. The fastest way most of us (Chrome users at least) know how to look up words is to highlight the word in question, click "Ctrl c", "Ctrl t", "Ctrl v", "Enter". A Google search comes up with the word's definition at the top. That's five steps in case you haven't been counting. 

However, on the Inductive, you can look up a word in ONE FUCKING STEP. Highlight the word. Go ahead. Highlight it: 

Antidisestablishmentarianism. 

(Moving your mouse over to "learn more" counts as less than half a step with one significant figure.) Despite this five-fold increase in productivity, Apture remains a fairly unpopular service. (I know because I get metrics sent to my email every week. Very few of you are using it. Idiots.) And so, whether due to its unpopularity or due to its potential popularity once idiots figure out it exists - if you're pickin' up what I'm puttin down - Apture has been acquired by Google.

This is perhaps, one of those rare instances of consumer preferences resulting in inferior products, that is, unless Google doesn't change anything at all about Apture, which, seeing as Apture eliminates the need for a search engine in the first place, seems highly unlikely. 

National Novel Writing Month

I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I'm way behind, and participating to begin with was stupid considering how busy and uncompensated I am, but I figure it's time to try being sloppy. Anyways, here's a randomly-and-hastily-assembled excerpt from the 5,000 or so totally unpolished and vomitous words I have so far:

It was always thought that time travel would be a quantitative thing; whether or not scientists thought of it that way, certainly the culture did. I guess in retrospect, it became clear around the early 2000s that time travel would take on a qualitatively different character than dude gets in machine and goes somewhere, and it was obvious even before that if you were one of those rare people who sits around all day thinking about the future of personal electronic devices or fab labs or harvesting trillion-dollar asteroids.  

I remember my own childhood when a family friend who worked for the air force came by to talk physics: we would spend hours discussing the potential pitfalls of travel through time or at the speed of light – radicals in space hitting the ship hull at super-high effective speeds and gradually poking little holes in the hulls until one day all of a sudden you’re very far from home with a very serious air leak, whether time travel would involve actually going back (or forward) and screwing up things or creating alternate realities, and would these alternate realities by super-focused, i.e. holding everything but properties relevant to some particular goal as constant. Anyways, we’d have these conversations, imagining these wildly different possibilities for future technologies that none of the science fiction writers or Time journalists had been anywhere near.

Well it turns out that out of the ashes of the first genomic revolution back just after the human genome was decoded came the phoenix of realizing that all of that genetic noise as it was called then – or the stuff that they didn’t really understand – was actually a very, very detailed record of the past for that particular individual’s genome; and it was this, combined with increasingly larger processing power and the new emergent engineering that started coming out of Stanford around 2030 or so, plus the entrepreneurial vigor of the Bay Area’s young residents, plus the new propensity for the public to voluntarily upload all sorts of intimate personal details onto the Internet, plus neuroscience shit, plus some other stuff which I’m probably leaving out and advanced mathematical techniques, and social forces pushing towards cooperation – am I getting too preachy?

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Promoting Local Craftspersons

I have some super miscellaneous links that have just been hanging out in Google tabs that I've been wondering what to do with. 

I support local craftspersons and respect people who make actual things rather than find clever ways to get more from the things other people make. (These people of course have their place in society as well, but, in a sense, I sympathize with the feudal Japanese class system's putting miscellaneous businesspeople last.) Anyways, I met the proprietors of the following brands and others at a local crafts fair a few months ago...

On the Cusp Pottery - Very bright and cheery!

Fumihiko Mochizuki - There's definitely an element of wabisabi in there. I wish there were a bit more online presence. Perhaps some miscellaneous businessperson should come along...

Finally, Walter Perlman - This guy is an artist. I had a ten or fifteen-minute conversation with him, and he kept going into detail about how he hates photoshopping and how there is no photoshopping in his pictures. Like a lot of photographers, it seems he suports himself via weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc., but his articstic images are just wonderful. I've refrained from posting any here out of respect for the artist, Follow the link above. 

Do any readers know any other local craftspersons who deliver over the Internet?

Happy Halloween

My fellow Reagan babies may remember this from elementary school:

I Gotta Fever, and the Only Prescription is More Post

I've been absent of late due to the fulmination of various forces in my life, but I gotta post. I worked for sixteen hours today, I have a meeting tomorrow, classes Tuesday, work Wednesday, and I have a problem set and midterm Thursday; so it's not looking like this week will see my triumphant return to blogging, although I can promise that my next substantial post will be very good.

It all goes to show, I think, that blogging is a luxury for the rich. I've tried to blog unemployment over at LoOG, but I've felt wraithlike doing it, overextended, drawn out, like being pulled in all directions with no end in sight. I can't devote the amount of time I want to to really examining phenomena like the Occupy movement, because doing so cuts way from time I could be spending working, now that after so many long months of searching, work - even work undesireable in normal circumstances - is available. So, it's official: I've progressed from the ranks of the unemployed to the employed. I'll have more details on this; but for now let's just say that I'm too tired to feel anything about it, and I'm deathly afraid of hubris.

Things are starting to settle down and become a little more regular, but I still have reservations, and there is of course a huge lag between starting a job and feeling the comforts of regular employment (I have trust issues, which I'll expand on in a later post.), and I'm super risk-averse now, and my experience in Japan has put a fire inside me that will drive me until my own death.

The Continual Reinvention of the Wheel

I haven't really been watching TV for some time now. The few things I actually desire to watch have become quite available on a computer. But, today I was put in front of the “boob tube” because it was the only venue where I could observe my beloved St. Louis Cardinals in a playoff game, and this got me thinking. I was glad to be able to watch without having to go to a sports bar or buy the game on my satellite service and pay a veritable fortune; given the current state of my pocketbook, this just wouldn't be acceptable.

So I surrendered to the inevitable exposure to the device that for so long has given us only something to be told and see but not an ability to inquire. I watched my ball game, and - besides the loss I observed - I was glad for what I witnessed. But what kept hitting me was the continual advertisements for the release of old DVDs in new “Blue Ray” technology. What got in my head was how information - TV-wise - is being made “better” for our consumption through continuing advancements in visual technology. Now, I'm very cool with that, as long as it's on a device that lets you ask a question in response to the tripe of the light-lit screen that comes into your house every night.

I've been here for the advancement of this technology, and it is pretty awesome; but I'm thinking that it is advancing to some point that many folks might consider close to Woody Allen's Orgasmatron in his famous work Sleeper: having an advanced piece of technology - no matter how advanced - such as a high-definition television will never replace actual, physical experience of any event it may be designed to mimic, especially if there is no way to "talk back". Yet, sales must continue, money must be made.

When is it that we will come to the realization that the flat screen in front of us, and whatever color content is being played on it, will never be three-dimensional no matter what name that technology has hung on it? Maybe it's just me: I welcome the advent of technology when it enhances learning or makes learning easier, but I'm not sure I come away any different after experiencing the History Channel on a “Liquid Crystal” screen than I do after watching it on my nine-year-old RCA, cathode ray tube-powered television.

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Cool Story, Wyss

This is pretty cool:

BOSTON -- The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that it has been awarded a $12.3 million, four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a treatment for sepsis, a commonly fatal bloodstream infection. Sepsis is a major cause of injury and death among combat-injured soldiers in the field, as well as patients in hospital intensive care units.

The proposed treatment would involve a miniaturized, dialysis-like device that could rapidly clear the blood of a wide range of pathogens, much as a living human spleen does, without removing normal blood cells, proteins, fluids, or electrolytes. This novel "Spleen-on-a-Chip" would be portable, self-contained, and easily inserted into the peripheral blood vessels of a septic patient or soldier.

The award is part of DARPA's Dialysis Like Therapeutics program, which seeks to develop ways to dramatically decrease the morbidity and mortality of sepsis, thereby saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the United States each year. Worldwide, more than 18 million cases of sepsis are reported every year, with more than six million resulting in death.

Featured Find: Jason Kuznicki's The Machinery of... whatever

From start to finish, this is probably the best piece I've read on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

September 11 was the day “Orwellian” stopped being an argument against anything. It became a checklist. My country started collecting various-sized bits of Nineteen Eighty-Four like so many grim commemorative postage stamps. Constant surveillance. Constant warfare. Constant suspicion. Last week’s enemy is this week’s friend, is next week’s enemy, and woe is you if you can’t keep up—Gadhafi, Putin, Arafat, Chirac. Censorship? Making steady progress. We didn’t get Victory Gin, but we did get Freedom Fries; close enough for government work. Oh yes, and torture. Because we are the greatest hegemonic power, and because we can do no wrong, and in the end, just because we fucking can, okay?

Who though is this “we”? It is the deepest, most festering wound of 9/11.

Someone does something shameful, somewhere, maybe just once, usually in secret. Someone’s data mining. Someone’s spying on citizens. Someone imprisons, with neither an indictment nor any other cover of law. Someone puts people on a secret plane, to a place where electrodes and power drills are the standard interrogation protocol. Someone cuts out the middleman and just tortures in place. Someone orders American citizens assassinated. Someone starts an illegal war.

In a braver time, these acts would have kindled a revolution.

Someone, however, is an agent of the state. Therefore someone wasn’t the real actor. No, we did it—that’s the core of the lie, right here, that that someone is us. Sooner or later, we find out about the thing we did. We say, in the awful light of morning, that we did it because we are fighting a dirty enemy, and maybe we have to embrace the dark side just a little bit if we’re going to win.

But really we did it because we were afraid. But really, we didn’t do it. But really, the ones who did it will keep right on doing it.

That’s what’s changed, post-9/11. In the end, we didn’t have the will to fight. We fought the terrorists, sure, and plenty of others who didn’t even attack us. But we didn’t have the will to fight as they took our civil liberties away. We didn’t even have the will to punish them afterward. The word “we” is the pawl on the ratchet of state power. It’s the little catch that ensures there’s no backsliding. The we clanks ever onward. The sun shines, the rain falls; the economy is good, or it’s bad. It doesn’t matter. The abuses haven’t gone away. We’ve mostly just gotten used to them.