Local NGO Links

New Mexico Wilderness Alliance
Upper Gila Watershed Alliance
Sky Island Alliance
Friends of the San Pedro River
Tucson Audubon Society
SaveThePeak
Center for Biological Diversity
Friends of the Santa Cruz River
Sustainable Tucson
Friends of Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge
Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection

Consciousness and YES/NO Psych Questionnaires

The questions were of the form "does x feel happy/sad/pride" where x were specific examples of mammals, insects, plants, machines, and natural objects. For example, "do ants feel sad?" and my task for one hour was to answer "yes" or "no" as quickly as possible; there were literally thousands of examples, presented every 2 seconds nonstop for 45 minutes. This was supposed to tell them about my "attributions of consciousness". What?

[Idea: Why didn't they test just ten examples from each of the categories?? 1) That wouldn't take an hour, and an hour is the canonical amount of time students are willing to . 2) To increase statistical power. Another, more efficient, question structure could be based on adaptive learning, where the computer generates each question based on the previous answers, so that it moves from general to specific, eventually oscillating around my indecision point (assuming a scale of consciousness graded from most similar to humans to least...this is assuming that people aren't more likely to say that a motorcycle can feel happy than a worm)]

IS this what science has come to? Who cares? These guys get public funding for this? What's worst is how insulting this is to me; that my nuanced feelings, opinions, hopes and fears about the realm of consciousness could be reduced to yes or no. No possibility for discussion / completely dehumanized: do they really think they're plumbing the depths of my soul in this artificial setting? Or, by "controlling all extraneous variables" will they only find only what they're looking for? I'll never believe another psych study based on bored college students pressing yes or no as rapidly as possible. College students are some of the most dumb and desperate people in society. Most of those guys were frat boy dropouts, hung over and world-weary; the quiet desperation of years of unreflective failure necessary to motivate young men to throw away their hours of youth for pocket change.

My strategy was twofold: first, panic and prepare to leave, but then rationalize myself into staying. I already sit inside staring at a screen all day anyway. Just relax, learn to accept things as they are. You are in a comfortable chair in a room of meticulously immaculate and barren cubicles. Is this hell? Purgatory? The ultimate aspiration of hegemonic standardization, the real essence of school and work and society? You've already started, already committed. Don't change horses in midstream. Impossible to rebel anyway; resistance is futile. If you leave now, shouldn't logically you also leave your job, turn off and drop out of civilization entirely? No, remain calm. I took my shoes off, relaxed my face into its most natural wide-relaxed expression, and drifted off while letting my fingers do the walking over the amazingly banal cavalcade of animals, plants, and machines. Such cacophony in the world, and to think that this is only a fraction of the things we have put words to: boulder, giraffe, falcon, daffodil, desert, taxi cab.

In the end I took my $10 but couldn't look the experimenter in the eye. And maybe I'm just paranoid, but I couldn't help thinking that that was the point of the study, that the real test was what it always is: will you take the money and shut up, or cause a riot? I've always been a reasonable fellow. But I don't believe anyone in that room was conscious.

Econ. Questions

Is gov't the only way to control externalities, or will the market correct its own inefficiencies? One solution would be MORE private ownership, so that the owner of the wild geese would have a vested interest in making sure pollution from the local coal plant didn't mutate their ugly ducklings, or whatever.

Do copyrights and patents prove that the free market system is irrevocably flawed? How does biology deal with the costs of mimicry? There is ample evidence that innovation is not greater in countries with better intellectual property rights. Does this show that these incentives aren't significant, and hence necessary? "The intellectual property issues, when it comes to copying drugs, involve an irreconciliable clash between rule and act utilitarianism."[Marginal Revolution]

What does GDP or even utility/happiness/welfare have to do with what we really want to maximize?

Are defense and health both public goods that shouldn't be relegated to the private sector. CF. The voluntary city.

Good Econ Reads:
Marginal Revolution Blog
Reason Magazine
Freakonomics Blog
Overcoming Bias Blog

Doctoring is a Doomed Profession

Although medical doctors have quite a large amount of power in our economy, I believe that their bargaining power is being diminished by technological innovations and managerial restructuring. Robin Hanson's idea of negative health care would significantly raise the prestige of massage and personal training at the cost of doctors.

Jason I. Altman predicts: "By 2030 all surgical anesthesia will be administered and monitored by computers, with no need for professional medical supervision beyond the surgeon." Even sooner than that we are likely to see outsourcing of surgery, as robots controlled from the next room are replaced by robots controlled from India.

Its only a matter of time until large, centrally-controlled and ineffecient hospitals are replaced by "the Trader Joes of healthcare", a business model that goes straight from the drug companies to the client, and "cuts out the middleman" who in this case is none other than the good Doctor.

DNA screening is the wave of the future. Ever seen GATTACA? You can currently buy limited DNA tests that will soon be cheaper than a doctor's visit to tell you everything from whether your kids are likely to have Crutzfield-Jacobson disease to what your life expectancy is based on genetic markers for cardiac disease.

Essential Oil of Everything II - questions

Various oils, notably methyl salicylate, are used to "clear" samples of tissue (like moth brains). The tissue goes in opaque, and come out transparent. How? Does it denature the "colored" proteins? I'm stuck on thinking of the fixed tissue as being like glass, but then i realized i don't know why glass is transparent or opaque. I know it is jumbled up at the molecular level....but I think air bubbles make it opaque. If you melt your own glass (CF. fulgurites) it is usually not clear. At first I was thinking of the absorption spectra of each protein contributing to the "white" of opaqueness, but now I am thinking of these second-order effects of how the proteins are organized (parallel or cross-linked or jumbled)...

Go emergent complexity

Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson: "Growth creates form, but form limits growth."

Are plasmids a new form of life different than viruses and bacteria?

Plasmids are like swap-out plug-in superpowers for bacteria. Bacteria can 'upload' them much like Neo in the Matrix uploads Kung Fu, only in bacteria it seems to be the plasmids that are in control: obligate parasites. They say this is the planet of the bacteria, but maybe they're just the metaphorical shells of the hermit crabs, the real kings of the planet, the plasmids. Listed below are a few of the common superpowers they confer on their mild-mannered hosts.

Fertility, ability to conjugate (tra)
Toxin production (Shiga, tabtoxin, Diptheria)
Symbiosis (pSYMin Rhizobiumspp.)
Restriction / Modification (enzymes)
Hydrocarbon metabolism (2,4-D, toluene)
Antibiotic-resistance (StrR, AmpR, TetR,ChlR)
Antibiotic production (Colicins, Agrocin)
Heavy metal resistance (Hg2+, Zn2+, Cu2+)
Virulence (vir, pili)
Tumorigenicity(in plants) (tmr, tms, iaa)

Levels of Abstraction

Hong Lei's talk on 1/24/07 brought up the old issue of whether we're smart enough to understand our own minds, the self-servingly appellated "most complex object in the universe". All of his statistics are motivated to try to capture the a priori differences observed in the spike waveforms. But just because we can see a difference doesn't mean our mathematics can [accurately] capture it. For example, his algorithm for labelling bursts uses an arbitrary cutoff and binning, so that some information is lost going from the original analog to the digital output. Again, when he measures constancy of spike number in bursts, there is an arbitrary distinction between "same number" and "different number" [with no regard for spacing of spikes]. But information is lost in each analog-to-digital conversion: information is lost at each analytical step. Today in Genetics class Dr. Pierson cautioned that we can make theories about biological mechanisms, but inevitably the biochemistry is more complex and nuanced. Eventually you are just taking averages of averages of averages. This is the danger in statistics of, say, finding the standard deviation of standard deviations.

Manduca DARPA Project

Flying is a difficult problem in an integrated system. The question is at what level of neurobiology could our course/coarse control (100 bits, 10 times a second) steer a moth? Will it be lower on a descending neuromuscular nerve bundle, causing the moth to jerk to the side and fall five feet, but regain a course that is say 30 degrees to the left, with a standard deviation of 30 degrees, so that it barely staggers and zigzags to the target, or can we hit the brain at the right spot to make it fly at exactly the azimuth we tune our dial to, or somewhere in between, say the cervical connective, so that we can bias the flight in some kind of nonlinear function --which might require a skilled operator not to over-correct in this situation, like sailing a boat?

I am a Libertarian

"Competition is merely the absence of oppression."
-- Frederic Bastiat

Freakanomics and the PBS series "Comanding Heights" (a reference to Lenin's conception that socialism, in order to control the economy, must control the commanding heights of the economy -- mostly energy production and concomitant natural resource utilization) about globalization 1900-2005, mentioned Hayek and the other libertarian post-keynesian thinkers. Hayek's book "the road to serfdom" , if you pick up the edition with the cartoons, is a great read. Also now am a big fan of Milton Friedman's work, and just finished reading David Henderson's "The Joy of Freedom" which is actually really good despite the hokey title. It mentions, among other things, that economics shouldn't be taught "theory first" with all that ceteris paribus junk but instead should just keep it real, with real world examples. Henderson has a great list of the top ten principles of economics, the first is that incentives matter. For a spoof see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4

Although there are problems with the explanatory power of a purely rational approach to the world, there are many things that are rationally/economically obvious (raising the minimum wage necessarily raises unemployment, tariffs hurt both countries), and I no longer think Stieglitz is the be-all and end-all (his textbook with the lighthouse on the cover -- referring to the idea that some services are best left to gov't -- is actually a non sequitur since it was shown that lighthouses were privately owned in England in the 1700 and 1800s). I definitely wouldn't vote for a candidate who thought the gov't could do a better job on anything (except maybe defense?) than private enterprise.

How do I reconcile all this dismal science with social justice and environmentalism? Paul Hawkin and Amory Lovins have the answer in Natural Capitalism, which due to space limitations I cannot quote in its entirety.

Raw Food and Raw Education -- Common Cause

Quote:

Formal education resembles agriculture. Agriculture greatly reduced the diversity of the human diet. Before agriculture, a person might have eaten 80 different foods each week; after agriculture began, far fewer. Agriculture caused a big decline in health because its fundamental assumption – it is okay to eat a small number of foods – is false or at least very hard to reconcile with nutritional requirements. Likewise, formal education (classrooms, lectures, textbooks, etc.) surely reduced the diversity of what was learned, how it was taught, and how learning was measured.

From Diversity in Learning
Seth Roberts in Ideas That Matter Quarterly, a publication honoring the civic and theoretical work of Jane Jacobs.

Wildflowers and Drought in the Southwest

http://www.desertusa.com/wildflo/az.html

drought watch:

The ag station's weather monitoring:
http://ag.arizona.edu/azmet/

Unique Gift Ideas

Chart your genetic lineage

Create your own essential oil

Save an endangered plant

Listen to bat squeaks

Ecosphere

Thinkers

Steven Levitt , author of Freakonomics
Seth Roberts, nutritionist and psychologist best known for experimenting on himself.
Stewart Brand, founder of whole earth catalog/magazine
H.L Mencken
Milton Friedman
Rustum Roy

Thinkers I don't agree with
Stewart Brand
Patrick Moore

Tucson Tourism

Retreats
Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center
Holy Trinitiy Monastery

Patagonia Wine Country
Mount Graham Telescope Tours
Arcosanti
Fire Lookout Towers: Weird people, good views.
--Atascosa Lookout, a restored fire tower on a well-worn trail

Public Skate times at Polar Ice



Places to Stay:
Peppertree B&B
Canelo B&BWest of Sierra Vista
La Posada in Winslow, AZ