George W. Bush started following the law George H. W. Bush signed when he was president: PL101-611, the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990.

That act required NASA to procure commercial launch services.

I say "started" because shortly after my subsequent congressional testimony on the importance of commercial incentives, I was working at Cape Canaveral on commercializing the MX missile as a launch vehicle when everyone in our firm received "VIP" seats to watch NASA launch a satellite. NASA continued to all-but-ignore the law. When I contacted Senator Gore's chief of staff of the Senate Science Committee to request Congressional oversight of the law, he informed me that our grassroots coalition simply did not possess the "power" required to see the law enforced. That is quite seriously no exaggeration of what he said. Since I had been working at SAIC on technologies that, let's just say, had a good deal of "power" I decided to drop out of politics lest I start thinking about exactly how much "power" I had. Ron Paul's 2007 campaign was the next time participated in politics.

There is a good deal more to this history, but since Google has decided they can't be bothered to make their search engine work in the unique case of Usenet archives, it is going to take some doing for people to find it. For those who can figure out how to make it work I suggest looking at the sci.space and sci.space.policy archives starting around the time that the L5 Society merged with the National Space Society.

PLATO had a 3d plotting program that let you cross your eyes to see things in stereoscopic perspective, but you had to focus your eyes at an unnatural distance -- so it wasn't the kind of thing you would necessarily want to subject users to for long game playing sessions.

That's one reason, second to cutting the 512 pixel X-dimension down by a factor of 2, I didn't torture my Spasim gamers with it back in 1974.

EEG indistinguishable from brain death.

Epidemiologists often _start_ their work with ecological studies despite their lack of statistical power for a simple reasan:

They're cheap.

The cheaper they are, the lower resolution and statistical power -- so you get what you pay for. Ecological studies generally start at the State level (or at the national level) -- despite their lack of statistical power -- and are followed up at the finer-grained ecologies.

This is not to exclude conclusions, let alone to draw conclusions. It is simply practical to have some idea of the phenomenology of the space you are entering if you can do so for virtually no cost -- especially if it lets you test competing predictions.

While it is true that the low State-level correlation with vaccination doesn't exclude the hypothsis and the high State-level correlation with parents doesn't confirm the "old father" hypothesis, we live in the real world of limited information where we are continually trying to invest in gaining more information. It's tough, but that's just the way things are.

I've seen no evidence that CDC has bothered to establish such a general purpose ecological databases to rapidly adjust priorities and husband precious resources.

But let's forget about preliminary, cheap but weak studies like this and go straight to the ideal of unbiased case sampling. Let's say such case sampling shows that "autism", however it ends up being operationally defined, is reasonably suspected to be caused by mutations in the father's sperm that increases with age. Moreover, let's say that this operational definition of "autism" is then linked, by genetic studies, to some set of mutations which present as a related set of syndromes called "autism".

We're left with another "epidemic", the cause of which needs to be addressed:

The "epidemic" of people delaying childbearing.

You're back at square one -- with about as many competing causual hypotheses as there are correlations you might look at....

Time to do some cheap statistical screening of competing hypotheses, however weak, and get on with the hard problem of gaining information about the real world in all its perplexity, under severe resource constraints, and, recognizing the limits of your knowledge, making decisions and acting anyway.

This is called being an adult.

You have eloquently stated my working hypothesis.

Yes, the original correlation I found in 2004 indicated it would be appropriate to, at the very least, add to the State-level database the age of father at first live birth to see if it was any better than age of mother at first live birth. Of course, the cost of that would be a few hours of some intern's time, which is why it would be the first thing to do. The second thing to do would be to add to the county-level database both the age of the mother and the age of the father at first live birth. This is a _lot_ easier than going out and gathering case statistics and should provide better signal to noise ratio than the State level. In some cases it would make sense to add data at the level of municipal ecology.

The thing about all of these steps is they are not only _very_ inexpensive to do on demand, once done, they can be reused in other ecological studies.

You're correct that government agencies are, due to political pressures, often ineffective in, if not destructive of, their stated missions. So perhaps "they" is a bad choice of words when "it" may have been more appropriate since the people in CDC -- at least the rank and file -- often go to work there because they _do_ care.

Here's my point though:

If there were neglect, or even active suppression, of the stated mission at the CDC due to political motives, the central role of ecological study in epidemiology means there should be some standard computer program that anyone with even a casual interest can consult for ecological correlations at the levels of national, state, county and municipality ecologies. And, to the sophomoric ignoramuses that blither on about how ecological studies shouldn't be conducted because they give rise to "spurious correlations", "the ecological fallacy", "correlation doesn't imply causation", etc. -- those same standard computer programs should have all of the standard statistical techniques epidemiologists use to _quantify_ those types of errors -- techniques that have been standard for more than a century.

By "casual interest" I mean something like: "A bunch of people are making noise about Thimerosal vaccination and autism. I wonder if there is even any _ecological_ correlation between prevalence of 'autism' (whatever that means) as a diagnosis and Thimerosal vaccination comparable to, oh, I don't know... let's say the age at first live birth of the parents." The work entailed should be all of about 5 minutes to enter "autism diagnoses" and see how those hypotheses stack up against each other at the ecological levels of national, state, county and municipality -- with appropriate confidence intervals, robustness measures, etc. Of course, as with all preliminary tests of hypotheses, even if something looked like it might be supported by the correlations, it would be a firing offense for such an epidemiologist to run around screaming "Eureka" -- but of course if they are a _real_ epidemiologist, as opposed to some idiot living in the fevered imaginations of Slashdot anonymous cowards, they wouldn't even be tempted to do so. On the other hand, if they were a _real_ epidemiologist, they'd be wondering why such a program didn't already exist as a part of the standard tool set of the CDC -- even if the CDC were under continual pressure to investigate the "epidemic" du jure.

JBMcB writes: "Because doing a wide-ranging statistical analysis on something as wide-ranging as "Autism," which is a diagnosis and not a particular disorder, usually results ..." spurious correlations.

It is the job of epidemiologists to do wide-ranging ecological correlations and use standard statistical techniques to discount spurious correlations.

If an "epidemiologist" says they aren't going to so such ecological correlations because they give rise to spurious correlations (aka "ecological fallacy", "correlation doesn't imply causation", etc.) they should immediately be fired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Locating by-State prevalence of autism stats over a decade ago, I started collecting by-State stats on hundreds of variables including vaccinations, mercury, diseases, econometerics, demographics, etc.

Three things stood out: 1) The best single-variable ecological correlation was mother's age at first live birth. 2) The best two-variable ecological correlation was Finnish ancestry and immigration from India. 3) Of all the variables, autism averaged the least powerful correlations with the wide range of by-State variables I had collected.

The mother's age at first live birth was a lower level of correlation than the 2-variable one, but it was more "robust" -- meaning that the scatter of points followed what you would expect from a "normal" distribution.

That was clear back in 2004.

I'm no pro, was not funded and didn't even have a relative with autism spectrum at that time (I do now). The fact that the CDC hasn't conducted an all-out statistical assault of like this at the county level given all the time, money and "big data" available is damning. They just don't care -- or don't want to know.

Back in 2006, I was asked on Slashdot what my advice would be to students interested in a career in AI. I told them to get their PhD under Hutter. Hutter's first students were founders of Google DeepMind thence AlphaGo.

I'm now, as then, advising investment in compression prizes for the same reason*. (And thanks to Matt Mahoney for pointing me to Hutter's AIXI theory way back then.)

*An additional reason today is founding "friendly AI" on understanding natural language. Before "friendliness", however one defines it, can be achieved, misunderstandings must be avoided.

See G4v Gravitational Wave vs General Relativity vs LIGO Observation for a more likely revolution in the theory of extreme gravitation currently being tested by the Advanced LIGO system that recently detected gravity waves.

The single most exciting thing about Advanced LIGO is that it is designed not merely to confirm General Relativity, but to discriminate between competing theories, one of which is General Relativity. A theory competing with General Relativity is a spin-off of the engineering that went into the device rendering the text you are reading now: very large scale integrated circuitry design.

That theory has been christened "G4v". Remember that acronym. It may become headline news.

G4v is a new gravitational theory produced by Kip Thorne's old CalTech colleague, Carver Mead. Carver Mead wrote the original text book on very large scale integrated circuit design. Over the course of his career, he became increasingly dissatisfied with conventional formulations of electronics -- primarily Maxwell's Laws -- at its interface with quantum mechanics. As the first PhD student of Richard Feynman, Mead was intimately familiar with Feynman's Nobel Prize winnig work on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) with its emphasis on an arcane physical quantity known as "the vector potential". Mead's book "Collective Electrodynamics" presents his reformulation in terms of the vector potential (the physical dimension of momentum per unit charge). It was through this reformulation, combined with an obscure paper by Einstein, that Mead realized Einstein may have just barely missed a more elegant physical theory than GR. At first, Mead thought this alternate theory may have been, what he calls "a poor man's General Relativity" -- which is to say it would make all the same predictions in a different formulation. However, in conjunction with Kip Thorne, he was able to determine that this was no mere reformulation of General Relativity -- it predicted that gravitational waves would have polarization that could be discriminated from that predicted by GR.

Charles Murray's book "In Our Hands" argues that universality is key to the pragmatics of the unconditional basic income for one main reason:

Everyone knows everyone else in the community is getting it.

This changes the community dynamics by placing social responsibility on everyone in the community -- placing the delivery of social goods "in our hands" rather than the government's.

Johnathan Cleese has also stated that "London is no longer an English city." due to mass immigration.

He seems surprised that civilization is a womb war.

The original definition of "conspiracy" circa 1300s, was simply "acting as one" derived from the Latin root "breath together" or to be "acting in the same spirit" depending on the sense of "sprre" (which was also the origin of "spire" in the sense of a cathedral's architectural "spire").

Therefore the original definition does not denotate conscious intent to act in coordination with others of the same "spirit", as does the modern definition. Somewhere along the line, the connotation of deliberately coordinated action became denotative.

I am going to argue below that this more restrictive denotation of "conspiracy" was a result of a "conspiracy" in the original sense of the word -- a "conspiracy" which did not require any deliberate, consciously intended coordination of action but was, nevertheless, the work of a group (or groups) for whom that restriction of definition was an evolutionary advantage to their selfish genes.

Group selection produces unconscious coordinated action between members of the group -- and humans have been under group selection since our common ancestor to chimpanzees (see E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth"). This has the same quality of coordinated action that occurs in the eusocial organisms -- organisms that also engage in group, as opposed to individual, combat aka "war". Indeed, the world's foremost authority on eusocial organisms, E. O. Wilson, argues persuasively that human society -- particularly "civilization" -- is evolving in that direction, which ends in the reification of the group, itself, as meta-organism -- a group of organisms "acting as one" on behalf of selfish genes expressing in the group's behavior patterns.

Now here's the key:

Because of the great diaspora of the human genotype out of Africa into a wide variety of environments, there has arisen biodiversity in the human genome adapting to a wide variety of population densities. In the areas with higher population density, there has been stronger group selection than in areas with lower population density. Over the tens of millenia, and in particular over the last ten millenia with the rise of agriculture, this has led to a substantial increase in the gradient of genetically adapted group cohesion between groups. Because these groups were not mixing, due to limitations in transport and barriers of language, natural adaptation to climate, as well as "xenophobia", this didn't immediately result in the destruction of the more individualistic populations.

However, with the rise of empires and resulting mixing of widely dispersed populations, it became a decisive factor in human evolution.

The original definition of "conspire" allowed more individualistic populations to talk about perceived patterns of behavior that were of vital interest to them, without taking on the burden of proof that there was some sort of conscious, secret Cabal behind the pattern. This burden of proof was advantageous to the unconsciously coordinated group organisms since it was, of course, impossible for the individualistic populations to bear in their attempts to come to grips with what was happening to them.

The most recent and stark example of this is in the mass rapes occurring in Germany where there is a "conspiracy theory" that the refugees acted in a conspiratorial manner to have some of them creating diversions while others engaged in rape of German women. There is no need to posit conscious intent on the part of the "rapefugees" and there is reason to believe they may be from populations more adept at group conflict -- unconscious warfare -- than others.

There is another state religion that denies evolution. This religion is being taught in all public schools. This is so because it is also uniformly taught in higher education. It forms the central dogma of what are called "the social sciences". As anti-science, this religion is far more damaging than the "dinosaurs and man walked side by side" theocrats because it actually informs most of what we call "public policy" at the Federal level. It is exemplified by (though hardly limited to) the widely praised writings of Harvard professors Richard "Dick" Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who, together with other fellow travelers, attempted to get Edward O. Wilson ejected from Harvard because Wilson dared posit evolution might apply to signiicant aspects of human social behavior, as well as to that of other organisms.

Those who weren't around in the late 1970's watching all this might not be aware of exactly how virulent and organized -- let alone wrong-headed -- the attacks were.

But one thing is for certain: The dogma that human biodiversity is an insignificant consideration in the social sciences is under increasing attack by the scientific evidence and, at the same time, it is ever more influential on public policy.

So-called "creationism" as theocratic anti-science threat is a red-herring.