Flowchart Philosophies

Part Two of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is online. This episode is a critique of ecological determinism and systems theories and how they failed to include human nature in their formulae:

Cloudbusting

I have been interested in the weather ever since Weetbix had a meteorology card set and booklet giveaway way back in the 1970's. Cyclones, anti-cyclones, isobars and all that laid the foundation work that years later help me get my brain wrapped around the implications of Brownian motion and chaotic field theory. System dependent on initial conditions and all that.

One of the implications of chaos is the bloody-mindedly difficult task of lassoing it in empirical testing. How does one replicate a moment in weather when each is a unique piece of infinitely complex, delicate and unknowable whole? Where does one draw the line in objectivity when, like supercomputers crunching climate change figures, measuring affects the outcome?

Nowhere is this more evident than in alleged weather control programs:

Fleming, for his part, doesn’t believe that a single one of the weather modification schemes he describes in his book ever truly worked. Even cloud-seeding, he says, as widespread as it is even today, has never been scientifically proven to be effective. Kristine Harper, an assistant professor at Florida State University who is writing a book about the US government’s forays into weather modification, says that doesn’t necessarily mean cloud-seeding is a total waste of time, just that there’s no way to scientifically measure its impact.

HT Arts & Letters Daily. I have thought for some time that dry ice and silver iodide seeding of clouds was one giant bogus placebo, but there's never a way to prove beyond reasonable doubt one way or the other, so why bother. Nah, the thing that scares me isn't this petty voodoo, it's experiments like this that puts the willies up me.

Carbon footprint gone to the dogs

The story behind Time to Eat the Dog has been bugging some small time:

Brenda and Robert Vale are professors of architecture at Victoria University, New Zealand, who specialise in sustainability and they claim the carbon pawprint of a pet dog (roughly the size of an alsatian), is twice that of a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year.

There must some absurd assumptions made to reach such a conclusion. What would happen if you threw a blue whale into the equation? Would it conclude that the craptonnes of krill are killed inefficiently and Japan should hunt these gargantuan mammals to extinction to save the planet? Is this a suggestion to trade pets into the SPCA for Toyota Land Cruisers?

Suffice to say that it is complete nonsense. There's evidence-based research and then there's this. Honest to Gaia, sometimes the ecological movement can't stop biting its own tail.

Interesting Times

More weekend links:

#NZonScreen has posted up the first full period of Mr Gormsby and an old documentary on Ralph Hotere and the evolution of one of his commissioned works.

#I'm glad I grew up when it was OK for an eight year old to have his own pocket knife. It was a time when it was still considered a tool not a weapon. These days kids are so goddamn high maintenance. Movie critic Roger Ebert blogs on Free Range Kids:

We live in a reign of terror. Outside the home, molesters and drug pushers lurk. Children drown, are hit by cars, shot, electrocuted, bullied, burned, stabbed, attacked by pit bulls, or kidnapped and end up with their photos on milk cartons. When they play, they make "play dates." They can ride their bikes outside--but don't leave the block. They can shoot baskets, but in the driveway, or at a supervised playground. If some kid tells you to go f*** yourself and you whoop him, you'll be seeing his parents in court. If he comes over to play and falls down your basement stairs, you'll get sued for the house.

#Mother Jones has a big dig on the US military budget. With chapters such as Where is My Flying Tank? and The Axis of Pork, it goes to show one more flavour of financial shit that the US is in.

#Property rights to the ends of the earth - One of the few delights on acquiring my old mortgaged shoebox apartment in Auckland some years ago was reading how my land was actually an airspace and 1/26th share of the stairwell that lead back down to the earth. I, or more precisely the bank, owned a concrete and fibreboard tethered zeppelin.

Things are a bit different in Britain, where they consider property based along Roman precedent: "[C]uius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos” (“for whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to the sky and down to the depths”) You can see reflections of these things from a Maori perspective on the Foreshore and Seabed matter.

#Last week's 60 Minutes programme looked a lot more interesting on the ads than the programme actually was. In an attempt to replicate the findings of a very rigorous overseas study, the reporter set up their own little experiment. This was supposed to show off the dangers of artificial food colourings in processed foods, a serious and deserving matter judging by some of the research findings. Instead, we got kids ODing on sugar and saying that it's actually the food colourings. The only conclusion I reached halfway through was clear. Current affairs reporting teams don't know shit about science.

One group of kids was fed only natural food and another bunch with only junk food. Afterwards, the ones who ate the party food were bouncing off the walls. One little show-off in particular caught the cameraman's attention. His Mum admits that little X doesn't normally eat any junk food in his diet, let alone sit don't to such a deliquent banquet as the one served up by 60 Minutes.

In short, it was crapulent reportage. And it's not just me. The Science Media Centre has called bullshit too:

"The experiment conducted by TV3 was probably one of the most biased you could ever hope to see and only showed that if you hype children up enough with expectations and make them very excited about unlimited treat food that they hardly ever have then they will behave badly."

#And talking about food, E. coli has been found in Nestlé cookie dough. So, you might say, shit happens. But consider:

Health officials still do not know how E. coli 0157, a bacterium that lives in cattle intestines, ended up in a product that seems so unlikely to contain it. The risk usually associated with cookie dough is salmonella, a bacterium that can be found in raw eggs. None of the ingredients in the dough -- eggs, milk, flour, chocolate, butter -- is known to host E. coli 0157.

#The Tao of Physics - Niels Bohr adopted the yinyang as his personal totem for a good reason. Hot on the heals of the Dalai Lama saying that democracy not theocracy should rule his homeland, the monks are learning physics. About time.

#And finally, what would the cast of Battlestar Gallactica look like on the Simpsons?

Sun might be hot

From the department of obvious science, outdoor workers are exposed to a lot of UV. It's called the sun, mate. It's why Africans are black and Maori are brown. Skin pigment is not some racial superiority gig, but a way to tune the response to the climate. In the meantime, some form of hat might be in order for the Gingas.

The Sovereignty of Self

It's business time as the Nats get down to living up to all of last year's election promises. Taking DNA from all arrestees will be one I think that they will live to regret.

The superficial attraction of the policy is obvious. Anyone who watches CSI can relate to those forensics tests performed to Miami Vice-like soundtracks. Although this fingerprint analogy has floundered, Simon Power has his "tool to prove innocence as well as guilt" mantra down pat. Let's see how long that one lasts.

No Right Turn has an excellent summary of many worrying aspects of this change of DNA policy, with all sorts of source materials linked. Attorney-General Chris Finlayson's report has sounded a loud ping on BORA issues. The breach of unreasonable search and seizure is not trivial. The Bill of Rights guarantees, at least in theory, the sovereignty of self from the state. If this law is passed and instituted in its entirety, I can almost guarantee that it will result in cases to the Supreme Court, which the Crown will lose.

I have very serious doubts. I expressed some of them over at MacDoctor:

DNA collection is nothing like fingerprints.

Fingerprint records, unlike DNA records, are readily confirmed. The uncomplicated and verifiable method of fingerprinting is nothing like DNA extraction, which requires much more meticulous and careful analysis. It’s one reason why Simon Power is considering staggering the introduction of the new scheme, as ESR won’t be able to cope with the massive demand for their services.

Fingerprints do not give away familial traits. It’s not just a matter of damning alleged criminals with DNA samples, but also their bloodline. It is one thing to identify law breakers, it is completely another to incarcerate their family’s DNA on a benevolent government database.

Which leads to another chasm of difference between DNA and fingerprints, and is related in theme to your mention of “at risk” interpretation of data. Lose or have a fingerprint database get stolen, no biggie. All you’ve got is a collection of ridges and whorls.

The loss or theft of DNA data is much more serious. With the UK’s state databases misplacing stuff left right and centre, I would be very reluctant to hand the keys of my genetic code over to some jumped-up Wanganui computer.

It maybe one thing to damn the families of the seriously mad, sad or bad bastards. But to damn the families of petty criminals, from protesters and drunk drivers to Millie Elder and Tony Veitch, is to go way too far.

But there's much more, and you don't have to watch Dexter to get the implications. Consider the case of Arthur Allan Thomas, where a detective planted evidence in order to get a conviction. Consider the implications of an embattled police force, more concerned with keeping their work mates out of trouble than protecting and defending the public. How much effort do you really think it would take a cop with a vendetta to plant some hair, some used undies? What if was to get their cop mate off the hook?

Consider junk DNA. No-one knows what it does, hence the name. However, it stands to reason that it must be there for a reason, whether it be as an artifact or something other. I'm betting on other. With this great unknown in the balance, I'd prefer to future-proof against any future eugenics experiments by keeping the DNA testing regime in a very necessary small padlocked box.

It's a well-intentioned but ultimately dangerous intrusion on individual, ethnic, and human sovereignty. Just as Einstein wished he could go back in time and become a watchmaker and not a destroyer of worlds, or the dentist who conducted research into the pain mechanism and saw his work turned into a military weapon, so too Watson and Crick may well be damned for their discovery of the human code.

With all due respect to Simon Power, this tool is also a weapon. You don't know what it does. Put it down gently and walk away.

All Men Are Wankers

There's a nice piece of moral panic in today's SST. The blurb goes:

"The typical man trading internet child pornography is an Auckland Pakeha, aged in his early 30s, according to new research from Internal Affairs."

I suppose it depends what one means by average.

"The most recent update, in February, included profiles of 215 offenders, of whom all but one were male. Just over half (52%) lived in the main urban areas of Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. About 75% (162) were New Zealand European, while only 1% (three people) identified as Maori. More than half (63%) were aged between 10 and 34, the average age range being 30-34."

So the poll shows just over half of the surveyed criminals lived in the main centres. This is demographically uninteresting due to roughly half the country's population also living in the four main centres. Nor is the supposed fact that almost two thirds were aged between 10 and 34. This is the golden era of wanking. What is interesting is that if only 76 percent were NZ Honkies or Maori, who were the other quarter? Brit? South African?