Marshall Brain's Blog

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Internet lets teen bullies inflict suffering from afar

From the article:

The episode reflects one of many ways that the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying standard adolescent cruelty. No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, "cyberbullies" are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks.

If you are a teenager, or if you are a parent raising teenagers, this is one more thing to worry about.

Here is my question. Why does "standard adolescent cruelty" exist? Anybody who has been to an American high school knows that it exists. There are bullies, and then there is the herd mentality that bludgeons anyone who does not "fit in". Lord help you if you are "nerdy" or "ugly" or "different" as a teenager. You will be harassed relentlessly, both physically and with words. This behavior seems to be wired in to a large percentage of human teenage brains. The behavior seems to be equally distributed between males and females.

What purpose does this behavior serve? It is as useless as racism. It is a purely negative force.

If you are religious and believe that God created humans in God's image, why did God wire this in?

If you believe humans come from an evolutionary chain, what evolutionary value does this behavior serve?

Why didn't God or evolution instead wire in "cooperation" and "acceptance"? It is interesting that all intelligent adults see the stupidity of behaviors like bullying and racism, reject them, and then move to a higher plane in their thinking. Why isn't that intelligence/wisdom wired in, instead of the purely destructive behavior of "standard adolescent cruelty"?

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Waiter tip tricks

From the article:

A recent report by Michael Lynn, an associate professor at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, shows that certain techniques employed by a waiter or waitress have been shown in various studies to increase their tips.

The tricks include everything from smiling to squatting to touching to drawing smiley faces!

Authorities: Don't Sell Your Vote On eBay

From the article:

"Up for auction is MY VOTE!," said Pengov's Aug. 19 posting on the online marketplace [eBay]. The item, advertised as "Presidential Vote for Sale," with a starting bid of $50, was yanked 12 hours after it was posted....

Pengov said he didn't know that selling a vote was illegal.

Not many people have heard of him, but the story of John Titor is interesting. John Titor was, allegedly, a time traveler from the year 2036 who stopped by in November 2000 to offer his insights on various Internet newsgroups. According to the JohnTitor.com web site:

Although there is debate over the exact date it started, on November 02, 2000, a person calling themselves Timetravel_0, and later John Titor, started posting on a public forum that he was a time traveler from the year 2036.

One of the first things he did was post pictures of his time machine and its operations manual. As the weeks went by, more and more people began questioning him about why he was here, the physics of time travel and his thoughts about our time. He also posted on other forums including the old Art Bell site. In his posts John Titor entertained, angered, frightened and even belittled those who engaged him in conversation.

On March 24, 2001, John Titor told us he would be leaving our time and returning to 2036. After that, he was never heard from again. Speculation and investigation about who John Titor was and why he was online continues to this day.

I don't know anyone who thinks this was anything except a hoax (although a fascinating one), but this week may be an important week in proving or disproving the John Titor legend. John Titor made predictions in 2000 and 2001 that are about to ripen if they are true. For example, these three predictions are very relevant around the Republican Convention in NYC this week:

• (64) This becomes apparent around 2004 as civil unrest develops near the next presidential election.
• (16) There is a civil war in the United States that starts in 2005. That conflict flares up and down for 10 years.
• (69) They [Israelis] are not directly involved but political situations are dependent on Western stability, which collapses in 2005.

A "civil war" in the United States seemed pretty farfetched in 2000, but is not quite so farfetched today. And "civil unrest" around the 2004 election seems downright likely. For example: Protesters set for GOP convention. If those protests end up being muted or non-existent, then John Titor was certainly a hoax. But if they escalate into large riots that spread nationwide in the weeks to come, then you have to wonder...

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Iran threatens to attack US forces in Gulf

From the article:

Iranian Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani has warned that Iran might launch a pre-emptive strike against United States forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.

'We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us,' he told Al-Jazeera television when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities.

'Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly.

Also relevant: Would Israel strike first at Iran?

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Stabilizing the global 'greenhouse' may not be so hard

From the article:

Humanity has the hardware in hand to halt the rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases it pumps into the atmosphere and forestall the worst effects of global warming projected for the end of this century.

The European Space Agency is starting to study hibernation as a way to handle long space missions:

Could astronauts sleep their way to the stars?

From the article:

The state of suspended animation that astronauts enter during long-haul space flights is a staple of science-fiction movies. But now the European Space Agency (ESA) wants to turn it into reality.

The reasons for the research are easy to understand:

ESA believes hibernation would help astronauts to cope with the psychological demands of decades-long return journeys to destinations such as Saturn. And because less space and food would be needed on such missions, the spacecraft would be lighter and easier to launch.

To end psychological stress, eliminate the large amounts of space needed for astronauts and reduce food requirements, hibernation is not optimal. It would be much easier to simply discard the astronauts' bodies and send only their brains, as discussed in A Revolutionary Mission to Mars.

Since the Mission to Mars article was published, it has received a truly remarkable amount of feedback from readers. It is interesting how attached people are to the concept of "body", and the concept that "mind" and "body" are inseparable. I think that those feelings are so prevalent right now because there is no other option, and there has been no other option since the beginning of time. It will be fascinating to watch that mindset change as robotic bodies and virtual environments first equal, and then surpass, what we see today.

It is also interesting to read the Mission to Mars article and then look at the obituaries. For example, just to pick an obituary page at random, look at this Milestones page from the August 9, 2004 issue of Time Magazine:

• DIED. TIZIANO TERZANI, 65, Italian-born journalist who reported from Asia for the German newsweekly Der Spiegel and various Italian publications; of cancer; in Florence, Italy.
• DIED. VIOLA FREY, 70, artist whose colorful, larger-than-life clay sculptures of men and women pushed the boundaries of the refined ceramic medium of the 1950s and '60s; of colon cancer; in Oakland, Calif.
• DIED. FRANCIS CRICK, 88, Nobel-prizewinning British scientist who, with American James Watson, discovered the spiral double-helix structure of DNA in 1953; in San Diego [of colon cancer].

Every day, thousands of people die of cancer and other diseases that destroy the body, but have no effect on the mind. Think about all of the children that die this way. These people are trapped in their failing bodies with no way out -- the worst sort of imprisonment. Many of them would gladly escape their bodies if they could, and they would be able to live decades longer.

This article goes in the same category with the question, "What makes cigarettes sexy?" It seems odd that putting 4-inch spikes on a woman's (not an man's) feet would trigger "sex" in the human brain. Yet that is exactly what it does:

Stiletto Heels the Ultimate Sex Appeal Item

The article surveyed 55,000 people and found things like this:

• "Women said that they viewed a pair of (56% black) patent leather stiletto heels as the essential item for seducing a potential partner."
  
  
• "Over 85% of the men responded agreed that they were mesmerised by a woman in heels."

How can this be? Yet again, it has to do with the effects of markers. The appeal of heels is that they act as a publicly visible marker for sexuality, just like cigarettes. According to the article: "The survey also revealed... that overall, heel lovers were much more adventurous in their love lives."

See also: Cell phones and sex and Smoking and sex.

A fascinating collection of small computers that run Linux:

Tiny SBCs for Embedded Linux based projects

GumStix is typical of the genre.

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Disaster at sea: global warming hits UK birds

From the article:

Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by scientists directly to global warming.

The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the first major impact of climate change on Britain.

The reason for the collapse is linked to a small fish that the birds would normally feed on while nesting:

A rise in sea temperature is believed to have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.

So, instead of breeding, the birds starved to death.

Why did the fish disappear?

It is believed that the microscopic plankton on which tiny sandeel larvae feed are moving northwards as the sea water warms, leaving the baby fish with nothing to feed on. This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years.

These movements of the plankton are affecting all the higher species that depend on them in one way or another.

The closing quote in the article mentions this:

"It shows that climate change is happening now, [with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the global number one political priority."

And that is true. Lots of people care about the environmental impacts of global climate change. But let's say you could care less about breeding seabirds. In that case, we know that most glaciers and ice sheets are now melting. Eventually, cities like NY, LA, DC, London, etc. will see the impact of rising ocean levels. So, whether you are an environmentalist worried about wildlife or a capitalist worried about trillions of dollars in real estate, you have an interest in stopping global warming.

What is so interesting about global climate change is our apparent inability to help ourselves. Even though we all know what is causing global warming (fossil fuels), and even though we all know how to stop it (stop burning fossil fuels), we are unable to do anything about the problem. We all need to go to work -- There is no alternative. To get to work we need to use cars or buses or trains, all of which burn fossil fuels either directly or indirectly. There is no alternative to that either, unless you ride a bicycle, which most people cannot do. Therefore, we all contribute to global warming every day. We have wired modern society so that, in order to survive, we must contribute to global warming.

It is a classic Tragedy of the Commons situation, where there is no short-term economic benefit to solving the problem, and quite a bit of short-term benefit to perpetuating it. So we spiral downward. One of three things will happen:

• The spiral continues out of control. Things get worse and worse and worse while we all wring our hands (which is where we are now).
• The crisis gets large enough to shock the modern world into action. We stop using coal, oil, etc.
• A new technology arises that either: a) removes carbon from the environment cheaply and in large quantities, and sequesters it -- preferably back underground in oil fields and coal mines, or b) fuels cars and power plants without adding carbon to the environment (for a funny take on one possible technology, see this article).

We can all watch and see what happens.