Intelligent Design

/ Science

Intelligent Design has two key arguments:

  1. Evolution is not enough to explain the biological and chemical complexity found in living beings.
  2. A reasonable hypothesis is that life was created by some “intelligence.”

The first argument has been addressed by a number of people, but it seems like the second argument has been largely dismissed since (just like Creationism or the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory) it doesn’t have predictive power and thus is a gut-feel rhetorical argument rather than a scientific theory. I think it should be dismissed on those grounds when it comes to science classes, but what surprises me is how silly the rhetorical argument is as well.

Consider: Intelligent Design claims that life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligence, even though:

  • The best known example of intelligence, namely man, is still woefully incapable of producing such a complex system.
  • When it comes to “designing” a biological system, the way we humans perform anything more major than a simple tweak is by evolving the new traits, be it by breeding dogs or in a petrie dish.
  • There’s not even agreement on what the word “intelligence” means beyond the fact that (most) humans posses the trait.

Given these rhetorical holes, I have to wonder whether the real reason Intelligent Design proponents feel something so complex must have been designed by an intelligence is because emotionally they’ve already assumed the reverse, namely that any system able to produce something so complex must in its own right be intelligent.

If so, then in a way Intelligent Design proponents are correct: there is an intelligence that designed life. That intelligence is the distributed system of naturally occurring patterns of reproduction, natural selection and genetic drift that we call evolution.

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BlackDog: personal server lite?

/ Wearable Computing

blackdog.jpg

BlackDog is a great concept. It’s a flash-based Debian Linux machine that fits in the palm of your hand (400Mhz PowerPC and 256 or 512MB RAM), with just a USB 2.0 plug, SPI and MMC Expansion slot, and a thumbprint sensor. There’s no battery or power plug — it’s powered completely via the USB plug.

Plug the Dog into the USB port of a Window-XP and it’ll automatically boot up from ROM in about 2 seconds. Then it claims to be a USB CD-ROM drive with an auto-run program, from which it starts up CygWin and X, and then makes an X connection back to its own server. Presto! Instant use of the host machine’s display and keyboard with your CPU, computing environment and data (up to 1GB through the MMC slot). Unplug and the host machine is left just as you found it. Security comes from what you have (the Dog itself) and who you are (the thumbprint reader), though of course you’re still susceptible to low-level keyboard, screen and network sniffing attacks from the host machine.

There’s a lot we could ask for from a personal server that BlackDog doesn’t have, like automatic wireless sync-up with the interfaces around us, but this sounds pretty decent and more importantly it’ll actually work with today’s infrastructure and machines.

(Thanks to Steve for the link!)

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Application To Be Stupid

/ Culture

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has just released a report on the effects seen from the repeal of Florida’s mandatory motorcycle helmet law back in 2000 (summary and CNN report). The effect was pretty much the same as seen in other states that have repealed helmet laws: deaths increased and costs to treat head injuries more than doubled (with $10.5 million charged to charitable and government sources).

Of course, the report just dredges up all the libertarian arguments about how the government shouldn’t interfere with one’s right to be stupid, so long as they aren’t hurting anyone else by their stupidity. That argument has an air of truth to it for me, and as a public service I’d like to propose a simple government form:

Application To Be Stupid

Name: ______________ Date: ______________

Intended stupidity (check one):

[ ] Riding motorcycle without helmet
[ ] Driving without wearing seat belt
[ ] Asserting my second-amendment rights while drunk
[ ] Other (please specify): ___________________

Please read carefully and sign below:

I hereby attest that I am hellbent and determined to be as stupid as possible, as is within my rights as a free-thinking adult, and assert that it is nobody's business to tell me otherwise. I also attest that all of the following are true:

  • Should I sustain injury, I will refuse any and all medical aid offered above and beyond that which would be reasonably required by a more intelligent person. I will wear my Stupid Alert medical bracelet at all times during my activity.
  • I am either not insured, or have filed a stupidity waver with my insurance company, such that rates will not increase for others due to my stupidity.
  • I have no dependents who rely on my presence or income.
  • I am either not currently employed or my employment is currently a drag on my employer and the economy. No business decisions have been made under the assumption that I would take reasonable precautions for my own life.
  • There is no one who loves me or who would be distraught, depressed would or otherwise miss me if my stupidity brings about my premature end.
  • I am of sound mind and and am fully capable of making a rational decision. I am not currently under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or inordinate libertarianism.

Signature: _____________________________

(Thanks to Judith for the link!)

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Chris Schmandt’s book available for free download

/ Media Technology

Chris Schmandt, the head of MIT Media Lab’s Speech Interface Group, has just made a PDF of his now out-of-print 1994 book Voice Communications With Computers: Conversational Systems available for download in PDF form for free off his website.

Chris was one of the readers for my Generals Exams, and naturally this was one of the books on my reading list. It’s 12 years old at this point, but most of the issues he talks about are inherent in speech communications regardless of the technology. Highly recommended.

(Thanks to Thad for the link!)

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CVS disposable video camera uncrippled…

/ Intellectual Property

With a textbook give away the razors and sell the blades strategy, on June 26th CVS started selling a “one-time-use” video camcorder for just $29.99. Buy it, take your movie, and then get a DVD of your movie for just $12.99 at the CVS photo lab.

Just 39 days later, people have figured out figured how to make it download those movies direct to your own PC directly through USB.

I don’t know how much these things cost to CVS, but they can’t be happy about this obvious development. (No word yet on whether CVS will be taking legal action based on vague “the government should stop anyone from poking holes in our poorly-thought-out business plan” laws…)

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Random factoid of the day: 222 years till Universe-sized hard drive

/ Media Technology

Another back-of-the-envelope calculation, inspired by a comment by my friend Beemer:

Atoms in the Universe: 1079
Bits on this year’s largest hard drive: 500GB = 4 x 1012 bits
Doubling time for hard drives: 1 year

Years before a single hard drive will store 1 bit for every atom in the Universe at current doubling rates: 222

Warning: past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.

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What about a Google cache on my desk?

/ Media Technology

Yesterday I said that within a decade disk space should be cheap enough to put the entire visible web on your desk for under $1000. I think that’s actually a pretty conservative estimate, since it assumes a 100 KB average page size, up to an order of magnitude higher than some estimates.

Here’s another back-of-the envelope: let’s say we wanted the equivalent of Google’s webcache on your desktop (that is, all the HTML but no images). Another way to calculate it starts with the fact that the 2003 update to Berkeley’s How Much Info? study estimated that in 2002 the web was only 167 Terabytes total, with only 30 TB as HTML (69 TB when you include images). Assuming 75% compression, that’s just around 8 TB. That same year a 2002 OCLC study calculated that the total number of web pages was only increasing by about 5% per year (with the number of sites actually shrinking, but the number of pages per site growing). That rate had been decreasing ever since the explosion in the mid ’90s, but let’s assume growth became a steady 5% and will stay at that rate for the next few years. (There are a lot of assumptions going on here, but the nice thing about these kinds of curves is that even if my numbers are off by a factor of two somewhere, so long as disk keeps increasing at the same rate that crossover point only changes by one year.)

Now we’ve got two trends, and just need to find the intersection point for the price we want:

Year Price of 1 TB disk Size of public web
(compressed HTML only,
assumes 5% growth/year)		 Cost to store
2002 8 TB
2003 8.5 TB
2004 8.8 TB
2005 $500 9.25 TB $4,625
2006 $250 9.7 TB $2,425
2007 $125 10.2 TB $1,275
2008 $62.50 10.7 TB $670
2009 $31.25 11.25 TB $350
2010 $15.50 11.8 TB $185

So given a few assumptions, we’ll be able to cache all the raw text on the public web for under $1000 (disk cost) within 3 years!

What about a Google cache on my desk? Read More »