Category Archives: Wobosphere fun

Transparency, Wobosphere fun

Irony: Dead? Transparency: In Embryo?

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Via Bad Astronomy, we hear that “there are 28 CCTV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell’s house.” This bit of information is brought to you by ThisIsLondon.co.uk, whose rather panicky article concludes in the following manner:

This week, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) produced a report highlighting the astonishing numbers of CCTV cameras in the country and warned how such ‘Big Brother tactics’ could eventually put lives at risk.

The RAE report warned any security system was ‘vulnerable to abuse, including bribery of staff and computer hackers gaining access to it’. One of the report’s authors, Professor Nigel Gilbert, claimed the numbers of CCTV cameras now being used is so vast that further installations should be stopped until the need for them is proven.

One fear is a nationwide standard for CCTV cameras which would make it possible for all information gathered by individual cameras to be shared — and accessed by anyone with the means to do so.

The RAE report follows a warning by the Government’s Information Commissioner Richard Thomas that excessive use of CCTV and other information-gathering was ‘creating a climate of suspicion’.

Now, I’m not so sure having the feeds from such cameras widely available would be a bad thing. Given that all technologies have upshots and every silver lining has its own cloud, etc., it might actually be pretty cool.

Dreams of the Transparent Society notwithstanding, I think we all know the real reason Britain is so gear to put cameras everywhere. It’s because the newest cameras contain neural-network chips programmed to act as selective quantum observers, capable of altering wavefunction collapse and thereby mimicking the method by which natural Gorgons operate. And thus,

If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals — or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link — will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

Neuroscience, Popularization, Quantum mechanics, Transhumanism, Wobosphere fun

Russell Blackford on Human Enhancement

I’m not sure when the idea of “human enhancement” first bubbled up in my brain. It seems to be one of those possibilities which I just grew up with, thanks to a childhood lost in books. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote,

There must be ways of putting nucleic acids together that will function far better — by any criterion we choose — than any human being who has ever lived. Fortunately, we do not yet know how to assemble alternative sequences of nucleotides to make alternative kinds of human beings. In the future we may well be able to assemble nucleotides in any desired sequence, to produce whatever characteristics we think desirable — a sobering and disquieting prospect.

The video version ends with “awesome and disquieting prospect,” by the way. Sagan’s friend Isaac Asimov was a little more cheerful; while dying of AIDS, he concluded the revision of his book The Human Brain with these words:

Man would then, by his own exertions, become more than man, and what might not be accomplished thereafter? It is quite certain, I am sure, that none of us will live to see the far-distant time when this might come to pass. And yet, the mere thought that such a day might some day come, even though it will not dawn on my own vision, is a profoundly satisfying one.

Continue reading Russell Blackford on Human Enhancement →

Wobosphere fun

Recycled Blake Stacey: Watchmaker Morality

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I’ve spent an awful lot of time scattering thoughts into the Blagnet. It’s a valuable way of procrastinating on other things and making myself feel like an intellectual. Unfortunately, it also means that on the off-chance I do say anything worth remembering, it’s probably buried in the comment thread to some blag post and can’t be retrieved without a string of Google search terms eight words long.

So, I’ve decided to start recycling the more entertainingly pseudo-intellectual rambles of mine, editing for clarity where I can. First up is a selection from this Pharyngula thread; the rant proper can be found below the fold.

Continue reading Recycled Blake Stacey: Watchmaker Morality →

Network theory, Wobosphere fun

Friday fun in Network Theory

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Via Backreaction, I just heard about this intriguing exploration in applied network theory:

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students — more than half of those who were romantically active at the school — in one long chain.

Out of about 1,000 students in the school, the researchers interviewed 832 and found that slightly more than half reported having had sexual intercourse. They found 63 “simple pairs”, i.e., students whose only pairings were with each other. 189 students (35% of the romantically active population) belonged to networks containing three or fewer nodes. And then, if you want some really interesting topology,

The most striking feature of the network was a single component that connected 52 percent (288) of the romantically involved students at Jefferson. This means student A had relations with student B, who had relations with student C and so on, connecting all 288 of these students.

While this component is large, it has numerous short branches and is very broad – the two most distant individuals are 37 steps apart. (Or to use a currently popular term, there were 37 degrees of separation between the two most-distant students.)

“From a student’s perspective, a large chain like this would boggle the mind,” [Ohio State professor James] Moody said. “They might know that their partner had a previous partner. But they don’t think about the fact that this partner had a previous partner, who had a partner, and so on.

“What this shows, for the first time, is that there are many of these links in a chain, going far beyond what anyone could see and hold in their head.”

This caught my eye because I’ve actually dabbled in networks, studying protein structures using “motifs” — small sub-graphs with particular connection patterns whose preponderances we examine statistically. I’d be interested in getting the actual connection data, running them through MFinder and checking out their superfamily values.