One of the things about Bab5 that was always fun for the hardcore SF fans was bringing back actors from classic SF television. Casting Billy Mumy (Lost in Space) as Lennier and Walter Koenig as Alfred Bester (a personal fav) were entertaining beyond the performances they delivered. Are there any cool casting choices about Sense8 that you have planned or can dish on?

As a former Amiga owner, I remember how excited the community was to learn that this new TV series called Babylon 5 was going to have it's visual effects developed on the NewTek Video Toaster. Many considered it a vindication of the Amiga platform as well as a milestone in the evolution of digital video. My understanding is that you moved away from this platform in later seasons because it wasn't scaling up to meet your needs.

Today desktop video is commonplace, and there are a million billion Youtube videos whose quality is only limited by the talent and time invested by the creators rather than any technological barriers. How do you feel about the progression from then till now and the role you played as an early adopter?

Subtle. In the rythym of the overall broadcast. A few years ago they did a piece on Weekend Edition about how Bloomberg was pushing for a limited set of "authorized" ringtones in NYC to combat noise polution. I was having a not-sure-if-serious moment until the article ended and the promotional bumper indicated that the show received support from "Soylent" corporation. Hearing that ubiquitous NPR voice cheerily exclaim that "Soylent Green is People" had me out of my chair.

If we're going to dredge up old, irritating Usenet crap because it's 4/1, you could at least pretend that B1FF had been made into a Slashdot moderator. Then we could have two pages of ASCII art at the end of each slashpost, and make all the mobile RSS users cry.

Choose one:

1. The ATF is a bunch of ignorant buffoons. A 3D printed gun doesn't have to last long if you are planning a suicidal shooting spree! Stupid calcified bureacracies are simply incapable of formulating an intelligent and agile response to modern technolgy.

2. The ATF is a bunch of ignorant buffoons. Getting up in arms over some obscure thing like 3D printing isn't going to make anyone safer. Stupid meddling, overreaching bureacracies are simply incapable of forming a thoughtful and nuanced response to modern technology.

So do I, and I actually think your argument is irrelevant. What you are describing in a nutshell is the 80/20 rule. In essence, a majority of the customer interaction problems any business faces come from a minority of customers. Your organization's inability to manage the nutjob 20% effectively is not a justification to deny access to the other 80%. Your leadership needs to do the following:

1. Drink the kool-aid on that fact that patient access to their EMR is an overall net benefit to the quality of care they receive. (aka, the "carrot")
2. Accept that even if you can't get your head wrapped around #1, HIPAA doesn't care and mandates it anyway. (aka, the "stick")
3. Establish reasonable and consistent processes to deliver that access in a manner that is cost effective to your organization.

But that is completely irrelevant. Any private entitty that maintains detailed information about an individual US citizen should be required to disclose those records to the individual in question under any circumstances. That goes for my doctor, Facebook, whatever. There may be any number of reasonable exceptions to this, but disclosure should be the default expectation. In the case of healthcare I believe that any cases of disclosure that are actually harmful to patient care are rare exceptions that prove the rule.

So to the 69% of physicians who prefer restricting patient access: Fuck off.

Officially, Card has expressed himself. DC's customers have expressed themselves. The illustrator expressed himself as well as making a personal business decision. DC is now faced with a business decision, but their specific choice will almost guaranteeably be a safe and legal one. This is how free speech and free enterprise work.

Personally, Card is just the one name in a long string of SF authors whose political and philosophical views generate interest above and beyond their novels. Larry Niven thinks the notion of privacy is obsolete. Issac Asimov was a proudly outspoken secular humanist. Heinlein got seriously pervy as he aged. I find it fascinating to see how these authors personal views bled (or didn't bleed) into their work at different phases of their career. It does seem like Card is going the Heinlein route in that his personal views are becoming more strident and more visible in his fiction as he ages. (I read Empire... it was fun even though I did feel like there was some Fox News inspired, masturbatory logic in it). Bottom line though, this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie agree.

I, for one, welcome our new competitively philanthropic overlords.

The new found social, political, and economic clout that modern day intellectuals are receiving as an outcome of the digital revolution is welcome and long overdue. The prize-ification of discovery and invention is a reflection of a shift in the priorities of our culture as a whole. The PBS Idea Channel has argued that in the modern area, societies pursuit of greatness has largely focused on athletics. That the money for, attention to, and veneration of athletes is what is largely driving the steady crushing of one record of physical acheivement after another.

Prizes like this, the X Prize, bug bounties, crowdsourced funding of science and technology research... all of this is a reflection of gradually shifting priorities. We are slowly redefining what it means to be a winner or a hero. Even if this sort of activity is a relatively minor contribution to the overall progress of civilization, it is a welcome sign of the times.

(P.S. Not watching the Idea Channel yet? Put away your re-tread oblig. XKCD links and get thee to Youtube.)

After reading the Musk analysis and the Broder rebuttal, I have to come to the conclusion that Mr. Broder's assessment is honest an accurate. I think there are two critical points that he brings up. These points do not paint Musk as a conniver, but simply as a proud engineer. He is trying to defend the engineering of the vehicle, but the problem was not with the engineering. The problems were purely operational in nature. First:

"I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking) that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel."

There are multiple references like this in the article, but I will address them all with this statement. Mr. Broder's account shows an all too common problem: a support organization that does not provide consistent or specifically correct answers to customer's questions. Guess what? Good support is hard. For a company of Tesla's age, with a product that has very little "gamma testing" to it's name right now, it is not the least bit surprising that Mr. Broder received conflicting and ultimately counterproductive support advice. Second:

"it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have affected the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters."

A change in the overall tire/wheel diameter generally requires having your speedometer re-calibrated if you want it to give you an accurate reading. It is entirely reasonable to expect that there is a lot of calculation going on inside the vehicle that is dependent on being able to correctly correlate RPMs to distance traveled. It's also reasonable to expect that differences in the rolling resistance between the stock tires and the AW tires would also have some impact.

These are not engineering problems. These are operational problems with process, knowledge, and execution. Musk should be rightly proud of the car his company is built, and should be rightly terrified that his post-purchase support could potentially burn a lot of goodwill once he runs out of early-adopting fanboys and geeks who will cut him slack and are motivated to fix their own problems. The I Just Want It To Work crowd will be a tougher audience.

Wait, that's the combination on my luggage!

This is just the overload/decoy argument that was one of the core criticisms of the original SDI plan floated by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. In the total nuclear war scenarios that were being addressed at the time, this was a compelling and realistic criticism. TFA seeks to move this argument into the smaller-scale defensive scenarios that AEGIS is designed to cope with. There are two core problems that weaken this argument with respect to AEGIS:

1. Since AEGIS is intended to defend against isolated attacks from "rogue states" there is a more legitimate question about the economic opportunity for a small state to overload the defensive capacity of AEGIS. The cost for the attacking state multiplies with each decoy launch, and the Total Cost of Ownership of a weapons system with multiple decoys grows as well. The USSR managed to bankrupt itself in the process of participating in the arms race with the USA. The capacity for a country like Iran or North Korea to successfully fund an overload strategy is questionable.
2. Additionally, one needs to look at the underlying logic behind this argument in the first place. The fear over SDI is that it would undermine the deterrent effect of a strategic nuclear arsenal. "Mutually Assured Destruction" was, in essence, a 50-year long Mexican Standoff that the entire world was playing. A partially effective SDI program owned by one power (the USA) was seen as something that would actually encourage the USSR to engage in a pre-emptive first strike. The AEGIS situation is entirely different. The nuclear scenarios AEGIS is trying to defend against here are based on the assumption that a rogue state is inherently unstable and cannot be trusted to NOT use it's nuclear arsenal, whether that is because the regime leadership is batshit crazy, blindly fanatical, or insecure enough to allow their weaponry to fall into the wrong hands. Assuming you buy that argument, then the more basic idea that "some defense is better than none defense" is a sound one. In other words, you go with AEGIS even if your enemy attempts an overload strategy, because you simply need the best outcome posssible in the event of an attack.

A more accurate synopsis of her argument is this:

"Since population growth and per capita economic growth are dependent on ever-increasing energy consumption, it is physically impossible for renewable energy to provide an indefenite supply of unlimited energy. Therefore, demand reduction is the only really-long-term answer."

While I actually agree with this position, it's freaking worthless. First off, the author's argument and the WWF paper are speaking to entirely different time scales. It's functionally equivalent to saying we shouldn't waste time advocating the use of seat belts because they don't protect pedestrians. Scope matters!

The second and larger issue here is that her counter-argument is just as reality-deprived as she claims the WWF paper to be. In her conlcusion, she states simply, "To which I say: Why don't we just not do it?" i.e. why don't we exert self-control as a species and stop growing. Stop adding to total population. Stop increasing per capita consumption. It simply doesn't matter how true that is on paper. I find it amusing that she name checks the Do the Math blog which has been linked on Slashdot previously. The blog is compelling and well-written. It also avoids the flippant suggestion that converting to a zero-energy-growth global society will somehow be as obvious as a Nike commercial. The "reality check" is that the reckoning over energy consumption will be painful. Death and violence are in the cards long before equilibrium is reached. Human beings have the capacity to plan for the future and execute on those plans, but the number of years forward we are motivated to act upon have finite congnitive limits. The climate change issue is a recent-but-not-exclusive example of these limitations at work.

There is of course an amusing logical fallacy in her argument as a whole. If we are to ever reach the equilibrium she seeks, whether that is by design or through painful reaction, that equilibrium would have to be completely fueled by renewable resources, since we must eventually run out of the non-renewable ones. Doh!

Still, I'm glad this got posted to Slashdot. Undeneath her specific arguments there is a clear undercurrent. "Physicists are smarter than all the rest of you because we deal with real stuff so all of you can suck it." That kind of attitude definitely belongs here.

So we have list A, made up of the day-to-day commentary of college undergraduates. Then we have list B, made up of random snippets of contemporary popular literature. The context for both lists are stripped away, and then they are fed to college undergraduates to see which set is more resonant?

Why of course, this must have to do with some sort of innate cognitive affinity for poorly constructed sentences! What else could it be?!?!?!?! One thing I know for sure... the results of this research are going to be really hard for me to remember later on.