mattwarren.net

Recent Facebook re-connections have caused me to remember my high-school days. I sometimes visit the profiles of people I used to socialize with. A glance at a profile picture causes me to do a double-take.

Christ, they look like that?

Yes, they do. Absent regular contact with these folks, I fall back on my hazy memories. But time has passed and my memories are wrong. But that doesn’t stop me from drawing a woefully inaccurate mental picture of these people.

Ideologies

Humans have a natural tendency to frame thoughts in a particular way and then freeze them in place. We do the same thing with the things we believe.

For example, glance at Tea Party opinion polls and demographic data for a bit. They’re mostly aging Americans caught on the losing side of the 60’s culture competition.

The dead giveaway is in the language. I read words like “fascism” and “communism” and it seems so… old.

This group tends to use cold-war era terminology that’s out of date now. When I graduated from high-school, the USSR was in its death-throes. By simple virtue of my birth cohort, I don’t interpret social events through that cold-war prism. It’s history.

But I shouldn’t get cocky. There will come a time in my future when the terms of perception will have shifted again. Then my terminology will be out of date. I will have been left behind. Will I be able to shift my frame of reference?

Geopolitics

The same thing goes for our mental picture of the world map. The gradual change taking place in the world goes largely unnoticed by a majority of Americans, until suddenly we wonder “how did this happen?” Rise of China, anyone?

While we were busy taking our kids to soccer practice and congratulating ourselves for being on the right side of some pedantic social debate, the world kept moving.

Back in May, I read this in Foreign Policy:

When I first read the news about the nuclear deal that Brazil and Turkey reached last week with Iran, I flinched. My reflex reaction was: Third-World troublemakers rally to the side of evil-doer in the face of Western pressure. That was, of course, the wrong reflex. (Traub)

Most of the article deals with questions of how the Obama administration should deal with ascending powers. That’s important and all, but more important than policy prescriptions is the observation that our mental framework could use some exercise.

No Gradualism

I suspect that for many of us, history seems to move in fits and starts that mirror our own attention span. Periodically, we panic and then reorient ourselves. It’s no wonder we all know some elder crank that bitches like this guy. It’s a stereotype for a reason.

So much of our angry clamoring strikes me as just another reactionary, socio-political mid-life crisis.

We ignore stuff. Then we go into panic-mode when the world appears less comprehensible. Whatever damned thing we’re bitching about will have been traceable and obvious for decades, but only if we’ve been paying attention.

Some of my lazy comic-forwards should go in my scribblepad (which is found in a Widgetbox sidebar on this blog). But screw it. Mr. Rosenberg’s comics sometimes illustrate valuable concepts that are relevant to my writing. And they’re funny.

Take this:

My deepest wish would be that humanity had this much sense at such an early age. But then, I suppose life would be a lot less interesting. I’ll just leave it to the imaginary green-skinned girls in an alternate universe.

Anyway, since this is the second Scenes from a Multiverse comic that I’ve linked to, I suppose I should just obviously shill for them. Why not buy a nice print of this comic and perhaps a T-shirt…once he starts selling them.

No time to read Friedman’s book The Next 100 Years? George Friedman was interviewed by Smithsonian.com about the predictions he makes in the book. Since I didn’t actually focus on his conclusions in my previous posts, it’s worth a look.

I love reading StratFor’s coverage. Well, maybe love is too strong a word. I’m fascinated by it in a sort of horrifying way. And though I find their analysis useful, I’m always on the look out for counter-arguments.

Frank Gavin recently spoke at The Long Now. He talked about how policymakers might use the work of historians to inform their decisions. Among the best of his observations in this utterly absorbing talk was the fact that historians can’t agree on the near past – the stuff they lived through. How do we expect them to have clear guidance on the future?

This is why he offers broad tools rather than specific solutions. I hope to draw on his talk in a future expanded critique of Friedman’s take.

Gavin’s five key concepts

Here are some excerpts from Stewart Brand’s summary on the seminar page.

• Vertical History
  What are the deep causative patterns behind a current situation?
• Horizontal History
  The interconnecting events of a particular moment…profoundly affect decisions.
• Chronological Proportionality
  The New York Times always gets it wrong, and they’re the best of the media.
• Unintended Consequences
  Things turn out differently than we expect.
• Policy Insignificance
  What policy people do is often not the main event at all.

Among these points, something that really stuck with me was the idea that policymakers can “strategically do nothing.” But since politicians aren’t rewarded for not doing something, this is an unexplored dimension. Non-events don’t register in the public consciousness and so can’t be identified as valuable.

Balancing perspectives

I’m attempting to cultivate a healthy interest in this subject without being entirely beholden to one or another take. Maybe its just a more cowardly form of fence-sitting, but I think that avoiding tunnel-vision is a bit more important than accusations of cowardice. Let me know what you think in the comments.

There’s a technology that’s maturing right under our noses. It has the potential to disrupt a number of industries and few are taking notice. The technology is 3D printing and it promises to do for objects what the printing press did for words.

3D printing is a form of additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is created by successive layers of material. 3D printers are generally faster, more affordable and easier to use than other additive manufacturing technologies. 3D printers offer product developers the ability to print parts and assemblies made of several materials with different mechanical and physical properties in a single build process. Advanced 3D printing technologies yield models that closely emulate the look, feel and functionality of product prototypes. (Wikipedia)

To get a better sense of what this means – and why the tech is closer than you think – consider the following video (hat tip to BoingBoing) of this normal desktop printer that’s been hacked to enable 3D printing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the surface, it doesn’t look terribly impressive, but bear in mind that this widget was produced with a common inkjet printer. Someday, we’ll break a mug and be able to print a replacement.

On to bigger things

But it’s not about mugs. If Enrico Dini has his way, we’ll print out buildings, too (hat tip to Pyroman).

Dini’s machine marks a vital step change from the shoebox-size 3D printing of today, to tomorrow’s ability to print complete structures on site. Although others have been working hard on the prototype, Dini’s machine is ahead of the pack, with the Architectural Association beating several others to get to the first marketable version. (Abrahams)

The article is absorbing not merely because of the tech, but because of the frustrated genius that’s driving this particular effort. On Dini’s approach:

Today though he is beating recalcitrant parts of it with a hammer. Enrico refers to a pin system for calibrating the height of the frame as ‘this fucking device’. He is exasperated by its limitations. ‘My machine is stupid,’ he fumes. (Abrahams)

Oddly, this builds confidence for me. It reinforces my stereotypes about creative, driven personalities that won’t settle. I hope. Maybe I just admire people that willing to hold their work to impossibly high standards.

The even bigger picture

The real promise lies in decentralized infrastructure. Our modern existence is tied up in complicated supply chains that may not withstand disruptive pressures. Long term technological thinking requires that we consider both supply chain simplification and also redundancies (the enemy of hard-core capitalism).

3D printing holds some promise where this is concerned. For a whole slew of items we’ve come to rely upon, we won’t need long, thin, supply-chain extending all over the earth. At least, that’s the hope.

And once these printers can print more printers, we’ll really be on to something.

The purpose of this series is to reflect on things embedded in my past that directly influence my thinking. Most are so much a part of my life that I scarcely see them.

I’m a gamer and a Gen-X’er, so I spent a lot of my adolescence playing video games. I’m not deluded enough to consider this a time of booming productivity, but it wasn’t all simple recreation.

Growing up, I never really cared about history. It didn’t interest me. Most of my history education took place in fundamentalist Christian schools. I was getting a ridiculous Texas-style history and science education before it was funny.

This experience signaled to me that history doesn’t matter. It’s amazing how crucial matters can be casually dismissed when you’re marking time until an ageless, omnipotent carpenter kick-starts Armageddon.

Pardon my digression

I don’t know exactly when my love of history developed, but Civilization II played a large role. I didn’t play the first game (I didn’t have a PC back then), but by the time the second game came out, I had a 486.

All I can really remember about that period was that I played two games: Civ II and Master of Orion II. Both are time sinks. Both are 4X games. but where they differed was in style and gameplay. Civ II made me wonder about history and technology because it was less fictionally based than its sci-fi counterpart.

My formal education failed to kindle curiosity about history, but this game succeeded. Fast forward to 2007: Civ IV is released. Now I’m a history and counterfactual addict – I’d watched Connections and Cosmos. By this point, I’m starting to cultivate a big-picture view of things. And I’m hooked yet again.

Opening Theme from Civilization 4

How I got that way

• All technology is related
  You can’t have what came after without first having what came before. The elaborate tech-tree drove this point home.
• Culture is a force
  Those expanding and contracting cultural borders caused me to understand the role of institutions in local and global power.
• Political borders change
  A human life is short, but entities like nations have a substantially longer lifespan. Look at a map. Now imagine you could speed time up and watch the shifting borders. We lose sight of this because we’re nailed to a short time-frame.
• Religion is social technology
  Religion confers benefits, happiness, and cohesion among political entities.
• It didn’t have to turn out this way
  No matter how rock-solid the past may appear, it didn’t have to be that way. It might have been some other way – some different configurations that would have led to a very different now.

Then there’s the accidental learning that took place when I read the Civlopedia. That in-game reference would inform me of the game’s mechanics. But every so often, I’d read about this history of the tech in question and then learn how far back pottery technology goes.

Keeping it in perspective

Washington DC wasn’t settled by George Washington in 4,000 BC. And no, a tribe didn’t decide to research horseback riding for 100 years and then – boom – manifest a team of horsemen. Obviously, it doesn’t work that way.

These are concessions to fun that keep the game interesting enough to learn those lessons later. An educated eye might find the game crude. and my lay-observations would seem quaint.

But for a kid who didn’t know or care about history, it wedged a foot in the door and created the space to care about humanity. Every cool subject I’ve learned about since can be directly traced to this experience. That’s one awesome tech-tree.

Here’s an Onion video from back in 2007:

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s amazing is that it’s making the rounds right now… as legitimate news.

And it is during moments like these that I understand why I appreciate The Onion so much. They lay our credulousness bare for all to see.

But as I argued last week, the sinister side of this observation is that even when the truth of the matter is made clear, it doesn’t necessarily help us. When any of us wants desperately to believe something, it takes a lot more than facts to change our mind. Take a look at this compilation of Facebook conversations (click the image to view it at full size):

While I see errors like these more commonly among those who lean right (right now, at least), the truth is that we are all potential victims. Our human tendency is to draw conclusions and then work our way backwards toward the appropriate justification.

And not to beat that dead horse, but evidence of this error doesn’t correct it. What follows is a small portion of that image above:

Billy, you never saw it when it first came to your knowledge. It is a piece of satire. It never existed. It wasn’t “pulled” from the internet. Have you ever tried to remove something from a massive, interconnected global computer network?

I suppose it’s easier to assume conspiracy and evil than it is to assume that we’re fallible, ignorant, and superstitious.

Lately, I’ve been getting into Scenes From A Multiverse. It’s a delightfully twisted webcomic by Jonathan Rosenberg that hits me in a funny way.

My continuing doubts about the existence of free will make me feel like that skinny green-gray female.

If we are someday visited by highly evolved alien life, it is distinctly possible that we’ll all be cited for pretending to be sentient lifeforms. The intergalactic normalization bureaucracy will not stand for it.

But, it’s not our fault. Maybe we can get by on a sentience-disability technicality. Why should I be held accountable for the gross deficiencies of our collective evolutionary past?

Anyway, read more here.

Slartibartfast: “Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, ‘Hang the sense of it,’ and keep yourself busy. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.”
Arthur: “And are you?”
Slartibartfast: “Ah, no. (laughs) Well, that’s where it all falls down, of course.”

This weekend, my family again watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It got me to thinking just how much Doug Adams’ books made an impression on me.

A little history

Personally, I don’t remember which came first: the Infocom game or the book. My memories are fuzzy. The book came first, of course, but I can’t remember when that entered my world. All I know is that I fell in love.

There was something about the premise; the ordinary nature of the protagonist. Anyone could be Arthur Dent, especially if they imagined themselves as forgettable.

What’s more, as a child embedded in a thick stew of fundamentalist Christianity, Adams was probably my first introduction (in a literary sense) to the idea of a universe where my soul was not the center of things. The protagonist Arthur Dent had a conception of himself that resonated with me.

Earth was destroyed (spoiler alert) and Arthur was caught up in aimless wandering among the stars. He was surrounded by aliens completely at home in their circumstances. He saw sights that were both beautiful and horrifying. Death was faced on a regular basis. Drifting further away from faith, I drew comfort in the idea that I was not alone in facing oblivion.

His blip-like existence was also mine.

What I learned from Adams: Life is a journey, often at breakneck pace, and toward uncertain ends. Every now and then, in between alternating hubris and soul-crushing fear of death, it’s good to glimpse the beauty around us and marvel that we get to be.

Final thoughts

Douglas Adams died on May 11, 1991. Coincidentally, May 11th is my birthday and 1991 is the year I graduated from high school. He was the first author that I cared for that died during my lifetime. Not a day goes by that I don’t have an offhand observation inspired by his writing.

The most long-lasting of his quotes is this:

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. (Douglas Adams)

If you’d like to appreciate him further, read the transcript from the euology. Also, here’s a lost seminar that he gave that I previously blogged about. To do him a far greater justice, read just one of his books and appreciate his good humor and perspective.

As a kid, I loved watching magicians. My family would go see ‘em on stage.

My dad used to do tricks during Sunday school. A family friend of ours even owned a novelty shop. I always knew where to buy gum that turned your mouth blue.

Even when it should have seemed hokey, I liked magic. This is odd because I spent so much of my youth steeped in cynicism. But Penn Gillette didn’t like the stuff, so he decided to go into it.

Penn dominates the stage, pointing, spouting like an evangelist, encouraging us to see the big ideas behind the wizardry, plucking at his double bass, doing dangerous looking things with a nailgun, cracking jokes at the expense of Homeland Security or dispensing a running commentary on Teller’s sleights of hand. He also has a habit of giving away the tricks – before Teller’s red ball act, he declares “this is done with a thread!” – something he describes as “a kind of peace offering” to the audience but which some of the other magicians in Vegas see as a professional blasphemy.

He couldn’t care less what they think. “I have always hated magic,” he says. “I have always hated the basic undercurrent of magic which Jerry Seinfeld put best when he said: ‘All magic is “Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over”.’ I never wanted to grow up to be a magician. It was never my goal.” He would rather have been a rock star, he says, but the business seemed already saturated with extraordinarily talented people. “So my thinking was, and I will say this outright, music is full of people I absolutely love. I don’t have a chance. They are all better than me. Magic has, ooh, nobody in it that I like.” He rocks back in his chair, cackling. “This is the field for me!” (Secher)

Late in my adolescence, I sort of shrugged my shoulders at magic. It was part of the catch-all rebellion against All That Came Before, but I gotta hand it to Penn & Teller. They broke through my cynical, Gen-X force-field and made magic cool again.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hat tip to BoingBoing for that Telegraph article.

On Monday, I published a glib piece about the apparent humor of the Russian spy-swap.

Then StratFor doused it in cold water with this great piece that seems to suggest that more was going on.

It is difficult to know what the Russian team was up to in the United States from news reports, but there are two things we know about the Russians: They are not stupid, and they are extremely patient. If we were to guess — and we are guessing — this was a team of talent scouts. (Friedman)

Spy stuff revisited

It’s only after reading this that I had even considered alternative jobs for spy teams. We all know that spies routinely rappel down buildings, take pictures on tiny cameras and smuggle microfilm in stuffed Pandas, right?

It turns out a portion of spying is somewhat admin-related. As StratFor speculates, there could be many other objectives that are hard to nail down.

Which is just a fancy way of saying that if we haven’t found any evidence of Russian operations, it doesn’t follow that they’re not there. It’s spying. It’s supposed to be hard to detect. And what are the odds that the most spy-proficient nation on the planet got something out of it?

But why would they suspect a Russian recruitment team?

One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings. There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was. (Friedman)

I wonder how many organizations fell for it? And in that moment, I wonder if the spies we traded were as incompetent as they’ve been portrayed. The Kremlin would love some American underestimation.

The Limits of Spycraft

Let’s consider two cases: Iran in 1979 and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the collapse of the Soviet empire were events of towering importance for the United States. Assume that the United States knew everything the shah’s senior officials and their staffs knew, wrote, or said in the period leading up to the Iranian Revolution. Or assume that the shah’s prime minister or a member of the Soviet Union’s Politburo was a long-term mole.

Either of those scenarios would not have made any difference to how events played out. (Friedman)

If you were spying on Russian or the Iranian officials, you weren’t going to learn much because they didn’t know enough. There was a mismatch between their intentions and abilities. This is why the popular conception of spycraft is so quaint.

In big-picture matters, conventional spy operations might as well include Tarot card readings.

Keeping Perspective

The more powerful a nation is, the more important it is to understand what it is doing. (Friedman)

When Russia spies, it’s about knowing our capability and intent and those are elusive details. Even the most innocuous of intentions might not be telegraphed properly. Nations may even spy just so they can adjust their foreign policies not to collide with ours.

Worse, since institutions are made up of a bunch of individuals, we aren’t completely sure of what we’re doing. The giant game of telephone sometimes gets out of hand.

So every nation spies. It’s not all cloak and dagger. There’s administrative stuff. And the lesson here – regardless of what the spy ring was tasked with – is this: No matter how poetic a thing is in my imagination, it’s best not to assume incompetence. They’re Russian spies, after all.

At the end of October, BRI will be hosting an Immunology Symposium. We’re a non-profit institution so we’re always interested in saving money whenever possible. Rather than spend thousands of dollars having a design firm generate promotional materials, we opted to do it ourselves.

Summary

Our institution required an HTML email “save the date” message, a website, and a poster. This post is focused on the poster element.

The finished product was sent out to a number of institutions after confirming that they would actually post them. This  required some good ol’ fashioned phone calling.

Design

The overall design of the thing conforms to our existing promotional materials in structure, color-scheme, and typography. This helped to constrain my options, which I think is a boon to staying focused on content.

This poster is 11×17 in size and focused strictly on the content. Wherever possible, extraneous information was cruelly removed. The use of graphics was kept to a minimum and no free clipart was employed. I may not be a designer, but I’ve learned enough from the likes of Seth Godin and Edward Tufte to know better.

I used Adobe Illustrator (and nothing else) to create this. Even with my limited Illustrator skills, I’m happy with the results.

Here’s a quick run-through of each horizontal slice of the poster:

Element 1: The Header

This most basic, relevant information is displayed for the primary sponsor, the name of the event, and the dates. The images, while quite overused in our literature, is readily identifiable. And since I didn’t want to spend too much time on what amounts to fluff, I used what we had on hand.

Element 2: Overview

The left column went through many iterations. Most of my time was spent refining the data and ensuring that I used as few words as possible to get the point across. The summary paragraph on the right remained largely unchanged from what I received from my superiors.

Element 3: Registration & Speakers

The speaker list is an obvious bit. That always ends up on posters because people might see a name or two and become intrigued.

Beyond the registration address, I’m most proud of using a QR Code, which takes you directly to the registration page. The best part of using this 2d code is that people don’t need to scribble down (or just simply forget) the web address. They can scan and register really quickly.

The newest crop of PostDocs is quite comfortable with smart-phone technology, so I’m curious to know if they will be using the code.

Element 4: Sponsors

This is another standard inclusion for any poster. I’ve tried to keep the space to a minimum since it’s not the focal point. However, we obviously need to give credit since most of these organizations are part of our day to day supply needs (with one exception: The Immune Tolerance Network, which is not a supplier, but an organization we work tightly with).

Final Thoughts

I’m looking forward to obtaining some general feedback about how well we did with all the promotion elements. I’m still giving thoughts as to how I can get feedback without being intrusive about it. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comments.

Over at Kongregate, there’s a game that purports to be both fun and educational. It purports to teach, but whether it does that well or not is directly related to its ability to engage.

CellCraft

Build a cell, fight off viruses, survive harsh worlds, and save the Platypus species!

This game was made possible by a grant from the Digital Media & Learning Competition. The goal was to make a truly educational game that was also genuinely fun to play. We hope students, teachers, and gamers will all enjoy the game, and encourage you to visit www.cellcraftgame.com, which will soon have an open forum and eventually downloadable teacher materials.

Based on what little I’ve played so far, it’s much better than the bulk of teaching games out there. That is to say, it’s actually fun – and that’s rare.

That’s what data can feel like.

Think about your inbox. When was the last time you could see all your actionable items in a single windowpane? I work hard to maintain Inbox Zero, but sometimes I struggle. Occasionally, I deserve a reward.

But the fact of the matter is that managing our inboxes isn’t fun anymore. It should be fun, because it’s our primary means of business communication.

A ways back, Mozilla announced that they were going to fix this.

Raindrop aims to be a sort of intelligent inbox filtering system that kicks minor messages and notifications to the sidelines while foregrounding messages from Mom and other important people you actually know.

Raindrop also wants to pull in messages from Twitter, Facebook, IM, and eventually any other communication platform with an API. Direct messages and @replies would be seen as more important and therefore foregrounded over regular not specifically to you messages. The idea is to make a people-centric communication tool that brings your various services together in one interface, instead of constantly playing a game of “find that browser tab” when you want to check up on a particular conversation or thread. (Dybwad)

Everything lives everywhere. There are too many clicks and pageloads. Is it so hard to fix this?

There are some tools, but there isn’t an all-in-one solution. For instance, Threadsy gets points for being browser based, but it only includes some of the data paths I’m concerned with. Also, I can’t configure how it looks. I’m still not really in control.

At this point, Raindrop is taking baby-steps. There’s a lot of room to usurp their hopes. But if not them, someone will eventually figure this out. They will make lots of money. And if they can figure out how to make it work seamlessly with Outlook server data, I will connect to it intravenously.

I just discovered an awesome tool courtesy of Tiny Hacker. Rather than waste time with words, check out this snazzy video that summarizes what you can do with it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As I start using it, I’ll report back on what it gets right.

The average admin assistant has little control over the way in which scientists present their graphical data. I like to make sure that anyone who wants help can get it. The usual way is to steer them toward some design books. Tufte is great when you’re thinking about abstract stuff, but the best way to reach scientists is to move from before to after.

For example

It all started with a slightly worn bar-chart printout from my boss. He informed me that the creator left, and we need to get the chart ready for inclusion into a paper.

As you can see, I got a printout of a very basic Excel bar graph. In order to save time (and better describe the situation), let’s just say I got some Excel garbage. Time to roll up the sleeves and see what we can do with it.

The first thing to do is to effectively draw over the chart in my image editor of choice: Fireworks. By doing this, I can preserve the exact measurements of the bars and take care not to unintentionally alter the data. After that, the X-axis lines are lightened so they interfere less with the bars.

Additional issues

Those of you who work with scientists know that you can get some really awful looking graphs with the basic Excel settings. Take note of the following problems:

1. The colors have no meaning whatsoever.
2. The bar labels are completely disconnected from the chart itself. Meanwhile, the Y axis is completely unlabeled.
3. The bar labeled “Teff” is a baseline of sorts, which all the data is meant to contrast with. There is no way to know this.
4. What is the title of the chart?

Final alteration

To finally take the chart from bad to better, here’s what we have:

The colors are simplified, the Y-axis contains data and is organized by size. By making a few strategic changes, we have a much nicer looking graph.

Final note: Ensure that you make all source data (in this case, the tabular data) available to any who request it.

I just got a hat tip from BoingBoing about this wild new publication: The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.

Here’s the description from Vol 2, No 4:

In this special edition on virtual-world goods and trade, we are pleased to present articles from a global cohort of contributors covering a wide range of issues. Some of our writers, such Edward Castronova, Julian Dibbell or KZero’s Nic Mitham will be well known to you as distinguished leaders in the field, but it is equally our pleasure to introduce exciting new voices. Here you will find pieces written by academics, practitioners, journalists, a documentary filmmaker and perhaps the youngest contributor to JVWR yet, Eli Kosminksy, who attends high school in upstate New York. We would also point out that this issue extends its format to include Anthony Gilmore’s pictorial story, Julian Dibbell’s audio interview, and Lori Landay’s machinima. In real life, most contributors live in the US, the UK and Europe, and we, the editors, are based in Australia and France.

A lot of the material is directly downloadable in PDF format. What’s more, at first glance, it would appear that the writing is layman friendly. That’s a nice change from the inscrutable immunological papers my labs produce.

I’m somewhat of a Tufte fan, so it goes without saying that I’m not fond of PowerPoint. But when you work in Seattle, Microsoft is everywhere. Moreover, scientists are familiar with the software because they used it in colleges and biotechs for years now. It’s the preferred tool, but not because it’s exceptional. It’s ubiquitous. Even non-PowerPoint software is very PowerPoint-like.

There are inherent problems in PP, and also the record is not promising. Throughout many versions of PP, the intellectual level and analytical quality has rarely improved. New releases feature more elaborated PP Phluff and therapeutic measures for troubled presenters. These self-parodying elaborations make each new release different from the previous version – but not smarter. PP competes largely with itself: there are few incentives for meaningful change in a monopoly product with an 86% gross profit margin (as reported in antitrust proceedings). In a competetive market, producers improve and diversify products; monopolies have the luxury of blaming consumers for poor performances. It is scandalous that there is no coherent software for serious presentations. (Edward Tufte)

Meanwhile, PowerPoint has become something of a joke.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All true. I have watched – and helped to create – some amazing visual garbage. As the years pass, I strive to expunge all the worst stuff. When I have to use PowerPoint, the results appear quite minimalist and with little fanfare. Amazingly, you can understand what I’m talking about, unlike the following example.

The process

Most of my PowerPoint use has nothing to do with presentations. I’m more likely to encounter scientific figures that I need to convert into alternative file formats. Incidentally, PowerPoint’s exporting options still leave a lot to be desired. Here’s the process I follow when creating high-quality figures.

1. Open the figure(s) in PowerPoint
2. Clean up and tighten all the elements; ensure there’s a consistent look and feel
3. Export to PDF format
4. Open the PDF in Acrobat Standard (or better)
5. Save this as whatever particular file format (and resolution) required
6. Crop and adjust colorspace as needed

It’s convoluted, but it pointedly does not degrade the contents the way PowerPoint would if I simply did a “Save As.”

Another option

So far as actual presentations are concerned, I think some completely different software might be a good thing to try. When I get free time, I play with Prezi. It’s a radically different way to create presentations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’ll take some time to determine whether this is a more useful way to create presentations, but I’m intrigued so far. In the mean time, I’ll continue to use PowerPoint because I have to. You just have to avoid using all those goofy, fluffy option panels.

The internet is amazing. In little more than a decade, it’s gone from a geeky oddity to utterly indispensable. Collaboration methods could still use some work, but there’s so much promise.

Have you ever traded a Word document back and forth with someone only to find a round of changes missing? You probably know what I’m talking about. Google has been positioning its Google Docs service to address this with live collaborative updates and other cool stuff.

BRI is a Microsoft Office-based environment and we’re implementing SharePoint to give us more collaboration options. But the thing I need most is more basic.

Web pages as book pages

When it’s time to submit grants, I spend a lot of time searching for webpages and taking notes. The NIH website includes more information than you can probably find. But it’s all over the place – a spaghetti mess of redundant hyperlinks Their available resources are dense, so it’s easy to wonder if you know everything you need to know.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Getting started & what to do

Which is why Diigo is so helpful. Watch the following video and get a very clear picture of why I find this service useful.

1. Create a Diigo account.
2. Install the toolbar add-on.
3. Join the Admin Toolbox group.

That will get you up and running. Beyond that, there are a few basic things to remember. The accompanying figure shows you the three parts of the toolbar that are the most important. Once you get the hang of creating bookmarks and highlighting text, you can share bookmarks across our group.

Thereafter, you can scan the contents of the group for updates to existing items. You can even send annotated links to people who aren’t in your Diigo network. In that case, they cannot add their own highlights or commentary. The best case scenario is one wherein everyone’s a member, in the same group, and sharing.

Over time, a pool of resources accumulates and you have instant, annotated documents at your fingertips.

Once you’ve added a bookmark to your online repository and shared it with a group, here’s an example of what other group members will see when they visit the group’s main page:

Some things to keep in mind

• All highlights are public, but annotations are either private or part of the group that’s selected.
• There are still some problems when non-Diigo-members attempt to view highlights from the provided links. This is likely due to incompatibilities among web-browsers.
• This service is completely free.

After using the Delicious service for years, I finally made the switch to Diigo last month. In that time, I’ve had a great time hanging on to thoughts that have been inspired by pages I visit. In the past, insights would strikes me and then quickly disappear. This was because I needed to keep my notes on the page itself. With Diigo, I can do that.

Much of this blog’s new design revolves around the idea that similar information should live together. This is why the three categories in the header bar – Scientific Administration, Admin Hacking, and Miscellaneous – are do more than just show you posts. They also display the most recent bookmarks from my Diigo account. In the future, they will include links to relevant podcasts among other still-emerging ideas.

Whether or not there has been a new post in that category, there’s usually something new to look at. This is part of positioning a blog to be relevant. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about and will be working toward over the coming year.

There’s a great article about this (by Mahendra at Skeptic Geek) and even though it’s focused on the business world, it’s really about the world of ideas.

The “Influence Management” entry links to a post by Mia Dand who describes how leveraging social media is often about using a handful of influencers (read: with large follower numbers) to spread your message. Contrast that with Dynamic Social Graphs as described by Robert Scoble, where influence is dynamically determined based on relevance and not just numbers.

My take-away is that there will always be big sites with many pageviews, but I’d rather cultivate a small audience of interested collaborators. The idea behind this site is to share knowledge. Involvement is not the path to reward, it’s the reward itself.

Scheduling meetings for our high-profile scientists is a combination of planning and luck. And while Outlook is our back-end tool, not everyone uses it because Apple computers always insinuated themselves into the fields of science and education. But regardless of what tool is used, there’s a strong need for figuring out what day will work.

There are tons of convoluted online options available. But in the end, something straightforward and fast is what’s needed.

Head over to When is Good and you will easily be able to poll people for their availability. In the end, you’ll have the dates and times that work. Then you can send the schedule, confident that you’ve picked a time that (probably) won’t be changed.

Better yet, you don’t even have to create an account if you don’t want to. This service is about as lightweight as you can get, but it takes a lot of the complexity out of making meeting arrangements.

"Why do we yawn, and why is yawning contagious even across species? Studies are beginning to explain, but the results aren’t yet conclusive." By Dave Munger at Seed Magazine on July 29, 2010.

• Everyone knows yawning is contagious. If you yawn, someone else will probably yawn shortly thereafter. As I did the research for this column, I noticed that nearly every article about yawning pointed out that just reading the article itself could make you yawn. Even your dog will yawn if it sees you yawning.

Tags: layscience

"Ever notice some people seem to eat anything they want and never gain a pound, while others seem to gain weight just by looking at fattening foods? You may be seeing things correctly after all." At Lab Spaces on July 29, 2010

• According to research published in the July 2010 issue of Genetics, this may have a biological cause.
• "There is no one-size-fits all solution to the diseases of obesity and type-2 diabetes," said Laura K. Reed, Ph.D, a researcher from the Department of Genetics at North Carolina State University, the lead investigator in the work. "Each person has a unique set of genetic and environmental factors contributing to his or her metabolic health, and as a society, we should stop looking for a panacea and start accepting that this is a complex problem that may have a different solution for each individual."

Tags: nutrition

"A new study from Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research shows an association between ADHD and a 'Western-style' diet in adolescents." At Lap Spaces on July 29, 2010.

Tags: layscience

"How much does it cost to have fun in Dungeons & Dragons Online's free-to-play world?" By Cory Banks at GameSpy on July 28, 2010.

Tags: gaming

"The Misconception: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. The Truth: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions." By David McRaney at You Are Not So Smart on July 27, 2010.

• The Misconception: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value.

  
  

  The Truth: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.

• Anchors can make big numbers seem small, throw estimates out of whack and lead you into decisions which, in the long view, seem silly.

• In many situations, people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer. The initial value, or starting point, may be suggested by the formulation of the problem, or it may be the result of partial computation. In either case, adjustments are typically insufficient…that is, different starting points yield different estimates, which are biased toward the initial values.

  
  

  - “Judgment Under Uncertainty” by Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky

• You depend on anchoring every day to predict the outcome of events, to estimate how much time something will take or how much money something will cost.

  
  

  When you need to choose between options, or estimate a value, you need footing to stand on.

• When you haggle over the price, you are pulling away from the anchor, and both you and the dealer know this.

• Drazen Prelec and Dan Ariely conducted an experiment at MIT in 2006 where they had students bid on items in a bizarre auction.

  
  

  The researchers would hold up a bottle of wine, or a textbook, or a cordless trackball and then describe in detail how awesome it was.

  
  

  Then, each student had to write down the last two digits of their social security number as if it was the price of the item. If the last two digits were 11, then the bottle of wine was priced at $11. If the two numbers were 88, the cordless trackball was $88.

  
  

  After they wrote down the pretend price, they bid.

  
  

  Sure enough, the anchoring effect scrambled their ability to judge the value of the items.

• People with high social security numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with low numbers.

  
  

  People with numbers from 80 to 99 paid on average $26 for the trackball, while those with 00 to 19 paid around $9.

Tags: criticalthinking

A counter-argument to Strauss & Howe's generational view of the world - with particular regard to global power-politics. By Niall Ferguson at RealClearWorld on July 28, 2010. Hat Tip to Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch (http://fpwatch.blogspot.com/2010/07/again-on-empire-and-punctuated.html).

• We have been raised to think of the historical process as an essentially cyclical one.

  
  

  We naturally tend to assume that in our own time, too, history will move cyclically, and slowly.

• Yet what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
• Complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes, what scientists call the amplifier effect.
• What are the implications for the US today? The most obvious point is that imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises: sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.
• There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: even if rates stay low, recurrent deficits and debt accumulation mean that interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue. And military expenditure is the item most likely to be squeezed to compensate because, unlike mandatory entitlements (social security, Medicaid and Medicare), defence spending is discretionary.
• It may not have escaped your notice that China now has the second-largest economy in the world and is almost certain to be the US's principal strategic rival in the 21st century, particularly in the Asia-Pacific.
• But what if the sudden waning of American power that I fear brings to an abrupt end the era of US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region? Are we ready for such a dramatic change in the global balance of power?

Tags: generations geopolitics

By Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on July 28, 2010.

• First, and this may be a minor point, Ferguson positions the piece against "cyclical" views of history, arguing instead that history is "arhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car."
• He then goes on to explain (or at least hint at) cyclical processes that lead to these sudden shifts. A better way of putting it might be that history is cyclical, but that the outward, superstructural manifestations of long cyclical processes often change very quickly.
• Beyond the specific issue of American fiscal health, though, Ferguson's thoughts raise some interesting and under-explored issues; namely, the role that generational shifts might play in international relations.
• It would be interesting to try to track generational attitudes toward foreign policy, and in what way those attitudes create cognitive "hangover effects" that make it difficult for countries to adjust policy to changing circumstances. There must be a decent book to be written somewhere in there.
• *Just a note, if you haven't read Strauss and Howe's Generations: A History of America's Future, you really should. It's a bit theoretically baroque, and I certainly don't agree with everything in the book, but it's a very conceptually-interesting journey through the ups and downs of generational memory and experience.

Tags: generations geopolitics

A good case for why we need to kill the modern news-cycle. By Walter Shapiro at Politics Daily on July 28, 2010. Thanks to Dylan555 for the hat-tip (http://twitter.com/dylan555/status/19764594739).

• What brings this journalistic parable to mind is the arrogantly unapologetic way that Andrew Breitbart has reacted to the furor over the ripped-out-of-context Shirley Sherrod speech excerpt that he posted on his website. Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: "I couldn't wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out." Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: "It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it." A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.
• Breitbart is just a symbol of a larger problem that transcends the poison-pen politics of ideological warriors (of both the right and left) and the slippery ethics of the blogosphere.

Tags: media news criticalthinking

"...you'll never guess where BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol A, is showing up now: Cash register receipts." By Aina Hunter at CBS News Health Blog on July 28, 2010.

• If you're worried about being exposed to the cancer-causing compound BPA, you may already know to be wary of some water bottles and food cans.
  

  But you'll never guess where BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol A, is showing up now:

  Cash register receipts.

• Animal tests have linked BPA exposure to a range of health problems, including cancer, obesity, diabetes, and early puberty. The studies are controversial though, and how they related to human health is not fully clear, according to WebMD.

Tags: health layscience

"Figures in billions except for World War II and post-9/11 totals; all are in fiscal year 2011 dollars." At The New York Times on July 24, 2010.

Tags: visualization geopolitics war

"Obama seeks to boost demand for organic food but doesn't offer meaningful support for the people who grow it." By Heather Rogers at The American Prospect on July 6, 2010.

• Twice a week, he hauls his produce 65 miles south to Manhattan to sell at the lucrative Union Square farmers market. His converted school bus runs on biodiesel he makes from used vegetable oil, which he is also trying to use to power his greenhouses. Pitts does a brisk trade; demand for his produce is high, and the way he farms is increasingly valued. Since the mid-1990s the number of farmers markets has shot up 300 percent, and the organic sector has seen annual double-digit expansion.

  
  

  But despite having no mortgage debt (he inherited the place), a ready market, and loyal customers, Pitts wants to leave his farm. His town recently rezoned the area as industrial, and if he wants to cultivate soil that's not surrounded by industry and its attendant potential for water and air pollution, he has to move. The problem is, he can't afford to.

  
  

  Aside from the standard instability farmers must endure -- bad weather, pests, disease, and the vagaries of the market -- holistic and organic growers face great but often overlooked economic hardship. They must shoulder far higher production costs than their conventional counterparts when it comes to everything from laborers to land. Without meaningful support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, their longevity hangs in the balance. In the meantime, the USDA showers billions on industrial agriculture. Growers who've gone the chemical, mechanized route have ready access to reasonable loans, direct subsidy payments to get through tough years, and crop insurance, plus robust research, marketing, and distribution resources. Whether organic and holistic growers raise crops, like Pitts does, or grass-fed, free-range livestock, they must contend with circumstances made harder by a USDA rigged to favor industrial agriculture and factory food.

  • Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily for this link.
    http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/slowed-food-revolution.html

Tags: sustainability

A rebuttal against Peter Beinart's "Think Again: Ronald Reagan." By Richard Perle at Foreign Policy on July 27, 2010. I'm not convinced that Perle has done a good job here. Beinart has a stronger case when it comes to what Reagan's own partisan supporters said about him. Though I have enough room to admit there might be some misapplied argumentation, it's hardly misconstruing things when he quotes those supporters. Perle has more work to do to make his case.

• it is more likely yet another
  example of the refusal of liberals to acknowledge the success of
  Reagan's Cold War policies: first, rebuilding a disastrously diminished
  security establishment (diplomatic and political as well as military),
  then challenging the Soviet Union in a way that surely hastened the
  demise of the "evil empire."
• What many of us who served in the
  Reagan administration do argue is that the delegitimization of the
  Kremlin dictators (accomplished, in part, by what Beinart calls
  "virulent Cold War rhetoric"), the rebuilding of American military
  capabilities, and a skillful arms control strategy (that eventuated in
  Soviet acceptance of Regan proposals they began by categorically
  rejecting), led to the Western victory in the Cold War.
• Reagan barely took
  notice of what was an insignificant "demand" for détente.
• Reagan knew what he
  wanted and he knew how to achieve it. He was rock solid in defining --
  and sticking with -- policies he believed were right. This was
  especially true with respect to arms control, where, often against the
  advice of the experts, the liberals, and much of the media, Reagan
  stayed the course until the Soviets gave him the agreement he wanted. 
• What
  the article calls Reagan's "sudden infatuation with arms control," is
  pure invention. Beinart refers to the failure to conclude a U.S.-Soviet
  arms control treaty in Iceland in 1986 and implies that Reagan, his
  heart and mind changed by political expediency, had abandoned the tough
  policies to which he had been committed.
• But Reagan, following his own beliefs and
  proceeding in his own way, achieved results no liberal foreign policy
  has approached -- or is likely to achieve.

Tags: geopolitics history

• The Kremlin has already struck many deals with foreign businesses — especially U.S. and European firms — and set out the first steps to make Russia appear more attractive to investors. But the necessary deals and investments will have to be on Russia’s terms, making this modernization program very different from previous efforts in an attempt to prevent the errors of the past from being repeated.
• In centralizing Russia’s economy, the Kremlin changed the laws, limiting how much a foreign business or citizen can own in Russia’s strategic sectors and nationalizing many assets owned by foreigners. This, along with shifts in Russia’s foreign policy, made Russia’s anti-Western sentiments very clear. Russia, with its oligarchs and organized crime, was already a risky market to invest in, but the legal changes made it even more difficult for foreign groups to work inside the country.
• Typically, the Kremlin has thought that as long as it had energy wealth it did not need a diverse or modern economy, let alone foreign investments. But over the past two years, a series of events has made the Kremlin reassess Russia’s long-term economic capabilities.
• First was a tumble in global energy prices.
• That resurgence led to a second issue: international reaction to Russia’s war with Georgia in August 2008. Russia’s confidence in starting a war with one of its neighbors made the West nervous and led many Western states to cease investing in Russia.
• This, along with reaction to the Russo-Georgian war, led investors to take more than $130 billion — nearly 11 percent of Russia’s foreign investment stock — out of Russia in the last quarter of 2008.
• These tremors in the Russian economy undermined the Kremlin’s confidence in its ability to hold its consolidated state and periphery in the long term.
• Russia cannot modernize its economy by itself because it lacks the necessary capital, experience and technology.
• in the late 1980s, then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced Perestroika, which allowed Western influence and technology to flood the country. This was a major component of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
• In order to entice foreign businesses and money back into the country — especially those with modern technology — Russia has had to do some restructuring to make itself more attractive for investors, yet it must stand its ground in certain areas to prevent a flood of foreign influence.
• The Kremlin’s first move was to give investors a certain amount of protection.
• The Kremlin is also softening the strict laws on capping a foreign firm’s stake in Russia’s strategic assets and sectors.
• Additionally, the Kremlin has drafted new laws on the legal status of foreign workers in Russia.
• The last step Russia needed to take was to appear more pragmatic in its relations with the West.
• To do business in Russia, one still has to be on the Kremlin’s good side. The political, regulatory and judicial environments in Russia remain restrictive, and the regulations are still convoluted to the extent that the Kremlin, regional or local governments decide what to enforce and how. The changes are intended more as confidence-building measures aimed at firms who want to enter (or return to) Russia. The legal shifts also make it easier for foreign firms and investors to comply with domestic and international laws on investing abroad.
• For the Kremlin, this is not just about controlling business and investments — it is about controlling influence and power inside the country.

Tags: geopolitics russia

"Russian President Dmitri Medvedev is leading a large delegation of Russian economists, politicians and businessmen on a tour of the United States this week. Medvedev’s visit is part of Russia’s effort to launch a massive modernization program that will involve attracting investment and expertise from the West. Russia’s long-term survival depends on such modernization, but the process will require changes and compromise within the Kremlin." At StratFor on June 23, 2010.

• Russia is launching a massive modernization program that involves seriously upgrading — if not building from scratch — many key economic sectors, including space, energy, telecommunications, transportation, nanotechnology, military industry and information technology.
• Moscow has seen incredible success at home and in its near abroad. Now the plan is to make it last as long as possible.
• However, there are two factors that could keep Russia from remaining strong enough to carry out its plans.
• First, Russia is suffering from an extreme demographic crisis that could lead to a further decline of Russian society as a whole, much like the decline seen in the 1990s.
• Second, Russia’s indigenous capital resources are insufficient to maintain its current economic structure — much less the economic power of the former Soviet Union.
• Russia is now looking to extend its economic lifespan in hopes that the country can remain strong for another generation.
• Russia has traditionally lagged behind Western nations in the fields of military, transportation, industry and technology but has employed periodic breakneck modernization programs, which have destabilized the country during their enactment while also bringing it into the modern era.
• The main unifying theme of each modernization period in Russia was that it required the import of Western technology, information, planning or expertise.
• Russia cannot simply throw more of its domestic population at the problem as it has in the past. It must import foreign expertise on a massive scale. So Russia is turning to the West for help.
• Russia’s timing in this is critical. Moscow feels more secure in reaching out to the West for such deals because it has already expanded and consolidated control over much of its near abroad. Furthermore, Europe is fractured (and becoming more so) and the United States is occupied in the Middle East. This is a very opportune time for Russia to undertake another grand modernization.
• First, Russia will have to change its restrictive laws against foreign investment and businesses, which the Kremlin implemented from 2000 to 2008 in order to contain foreign influence in the country.
• Second, Russia has to moderate anti-Western elements of its foreign policy implemented from 2005 to 2008, to show that the country is pragmatic when it comes to foreigners.
• Third, Russia will have to decide which investors and businesses to invite into the country.
• The fourth part of the process is the most difficult and the most important. The Kremlin must calculate how far it can modernize without compromising the core of Russia, which depends on domestic consolidation and national security above everything else.
• Russia remembers all too well what happened during the last modernization process — Perestroika — when too much modern and Western influence flooded the country, collapsing the Soviet Union’s social structure and political control.
• First, there are those in the Kremlin — like Medvedev — who want full modernization, with sweeping reforms.
• Second, there are the conservatives — who form the majority in the Kremlin — who are terrified that the chaos and collapse which followed Perestroika will recur.
• That is why Russia is heading down the path of the third group within the Kremlin. This group is led by Putin, who is attempting to implement modernization in an incredibly careful step-by-step process in order to lead the country into the future while controlling foreign forces, to prevent them from shaking Russia’s foundation.

Tags: geopolitics russia

"People initially expect to learn a new skill easily, then become overly pessimistic when reality sets in." By Cynthia Graber at Scientific American Podcast on July 27, 2010.

• Researchers performed six experiments that involved subjects trying out new tasks—including drawing an image from looking at its reflection in a mirror, and learning to type on a new kind of keyboard. The participants were asked how long it would take them to learn the task. They tended to be overconfident and thought they’d do better on the first try than they actually did.

Tags: layscience criticalthinking

"Rand defined metaphysics as “the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of ‘being qua being.’” Well, that sure narrows it down!" By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on July 26, 2010.

• Metaphysics, in the proper sense of the word, is dialectical physics, or an attempt to determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions.
• Even when used to defend postulates that are basically sound, metaphysics remains, in the words of F. H. Bradley, “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.”
• Karl Popper applied the word metaphysics to any claims or conjectures that are not empirically testable.
• I don’t choose to call my so-called “basic view” of the universe metaphysical. It is merely, as Santayana calls it, cosmology or natural philosophy.
• Unlike Rand, I don’t believe these basic presuppositions can be defended or validated via axioms or logical argumentation. All these fundamental presuppositions may conceivably be illusory—that is to say, the arguments against them cannot be decisively refuted. They are presuppositions which nature has bred in us (probably via evolution) and which have proved their worth, not by logic, but through centuries of practice.
• They neither require nor are amenable to logical justification.
• The belief that all human contentions and presuppositions require explicit philosophical justification constitutes a false demand.
• Rand’s foundationalism only serves to encourage rationalization, verbalism, essentialism, and other modes of empty speculation, and is often symptomatic of a dogmatic turn of mind that has trouble accepting the provisional and conjectural nature of knowledge.

Tags: philosophy criticalthinking

"If you want to figure out a way forward for Afghanistan, fake history is not the place to start. " By Christian Caryl at Foreign Policy on July 26, 2010.

• Afghanistan, we're told, is
  "the graveyard of empires."
• Look, failure is always a possible outcome, especially judging
  by the way things have been going lately. But if the United States and its allies end up
  messing up their part of the equation, blame it on their bad policy decisions.
  Don't blame it on a supersimplified version of Afghanistan's history -- especially
  if you prefer to overlook the details.
• One of those myths, for example, is that Afghanistan is
  inherently unconquerable thanks to the fierceness of its inhabitants and the
  formidable nature of its terrain. But this isn't at all borne out by the
  history. "Until 1840 Afghanistan was better known as a 'highway of conquest'
  rather than the 'graveyard of empires,'" Barfield points out. "For 2,500 years
  it was always part of somebody's empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in
  the fifth century B.C."
• Alexander's
  successors managed to keep the place under their control for another 200 years.
• Genghis
  had "no trouble at all overrunning the place," and his descendants would build
  wide-ranging kingdoms using Afghanistan as a base.
• But context is everything. Everyone tends to forget what
  happened after the rout of the British: In 1842 they invaded again, defeating
  every Afghan army sent out against them.
• Britain's foreign-policy aim, which it ultimately
  achieved, was to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer state outside the
  influence of imperial competitors, such as the Russians.
• But
  even the most skeptical historians concede that, around 1984 or so, the Soviets
  were actually getting the better of the mujahideen. It was the U.S. decision
  to send shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan resistance,
  which robbed the Russian helicopter gunships of their superiority, that allowed
  the guerrillas to stage a comeback.
• As Barfield points out, the war against the Soviets was sharply
  different from previous rebellions in Afghanistan's history as a state, which
  were relatively fleeting and almost always local affairs, usually revolving
  around dynastic power struggles. "From 1929 to 1978," he says, "the country was
  completely at peace."
• Unfortunately, popular views of the place today are shaped
  by the past 30 years of seemingly unceasing warfare rather than substantive
  knowledge of the country's history.
• Anti-war activists routinely blame the
  post-2001 Western military presence in the country for the destruction of national
  infrastructure and the widespread cultivation of opium poppies -- both of which
  actually date back to the Soviet invasion and the civil war that followed.
  Others play up the notion of Afghanistan as inherently immune to civilization:
  "We are not going to ever defeat the insurgency," said Canadian Prime Minister
  Stephen Harper on CNN in 2009. "Afghanistan has probably had - my reading of
  Afghanistan history - it's probably had an insurgency forever, of some kind."
• One thing is for sure: If we really want
  Afghans to attain the future they deserve, clinging to a fake version of their
  history won't help.

Tags: geopolitics

By Brie Gordon. How to further customize your Posterous experience.

• Here's what you need to do to set your own favicon:
  1. Log into posterous.com
  2. Scroll down and click 'Theme My Site'
  3. Click 'Advanced'
  4. Click 'Expand'
  5. Remove this line:
      <link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon.png" type="image/x-png"/>

  6. Place a line like this where the one you removed was:
      <link href="http://www.unixsysadmin.org/favicon.ico" rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" />

  7. Click 'Save, I'm done!'
  8. Click 'OK'

Tags: blogging posterous

"The story Kennedy tells, which repeats itself in various individual permutations from the Habsburg Empire to the USSR, is one in which states rise to prominence on the backs of strong financial and productive apparatuses, which they are then able to convert into military power, and fall from such lofty heights through overextending their resources, running up insurmountable debts and (sometimes) fighting counterproductive wars." By Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on July 26, 2010.

• I tend to fall in between the two camps, largely out of a certain fatalism toward America's role as an imperial state/great power. Ethical or unethical, strategically tenable or strategically foolish, consistent or inconsistent with America's core values, the international position that the United States currently occupies is unlikely to change except in the face of serious structural pressure. The inertia of the status quo, and the colossal political and economic interests and institutions that have dedicated themselves to its perpetuation, is likely beyond the power of American leaders to change in any more than a superficial way. If the U.S. is going to be an imperial power, then, it might as well try to do a decent job at it.

Tags: geopolitics

"His new show, Louie, displays a fine dark humor." By Troy Patterson at Slate on July 26, 2010.

• he dwells lavishly on his mortality
• Louis C.K.—or, more precisely, the comic persona we see him deploy in segments of his consistently excellent stand-up act and in uneven short films amounting to blurts of surrealistic autobiography—isn't especially jaded or anxious.
• The crux of the shtick is that he's free of illusions
• It is as if, beneath the anger that every good comedian must cultivate and cherish, he's achieved a kind of philosophical peace. Having meditated on the world's absurd injustices, he greets them with absurdity in kind. In all, the outlook qualifies him as a kind of existential hero.

Tags: comedy society