Archive for the ‘Communications’ Category

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Oh How Far We Have Come!

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

By David L. Brown

In 1965 Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel Corp., wrote a paper in which he predicted that computing power would continue to increase exponentially, that is, doubling again and again. Moore noted that since the invention of transistors, about seven years before, the number of components (switches) that could be put on a single integrated circuit chip had doubled approximately every year. He claimed that that trend would continue “for at least ten years.”

Well, what has become known as “Moore’s Law” turned out to be an understatement. Since his paper appeared, computing power has continued to double, not every year but every 18 to 24 months, regular as clockwork. And while contrarians have often claimed the end is in sight, technology has continued to roll forward. Present estimates are that Moore’s Law will continue  to hold true until at least 2015, and the promise of new methods coming over the horizon may extend the exponential expansion even further. And, oh yes, should quantum computing become a developed technology, it could go even faster and further to almost unimaginable levels of storage and computing power. In a few years, you may be able to hold the entire contents of the Library of Congress in one hand while scratching your head with the other.

Words are great things, and it is my personal belief that despite the old saying they are more powerful than pictures. Sometimes, though…well, here’s an example.

storage-1980-2010crop1What you see here are two forms of computer storage, one from 30 years ago and one from today. On the left is an eight-unit IBM 3380 Disk System from 1980. Each of the eight units can hold 2.5 GB of data, so the total capacity of the array is 20 GB. The estimated cost of this system ranged to more than $1 million. It weighs about 4400 pounds. This was an advanced example of the cutting-edge technology that had put a man on the Moon.

On the right, by way of comparison, we see three 32 GB micro SD flash memory cards from today. Each card has more than half again more capacity than the complete IBM array from 30 years ago, and together the three cards could store nearly five times as much as the eight units of the old hard disk unit. The weight of a single flash memory chip is about half a gram, or 1/70th of an ounce. You can buy a 32 GB flash card for less than a hundred bucks, and Apple’s latest iPod and iPhone products, not to mention the new iPad, can be ordered with that much memory. Prices are sure to come down fast as new, even larger capacity products hit the market.

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Posted in Communications, Economics, Technology | Comments Off

How the Earth Was Lost

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

By David L. Brown

I have been silent in recent weeks on the subject of climate change. My reason: I am gobsmacked by the success of the anti-global warming activities that have taken place. Science and reason are in full retreat in the face of the most astounding set of charges, accusations, and declarations I have ever seen.

vesuvius_in_eruptionWhat can you say when faced with the unimaginable? Think of it as like standing in the middle of a Roman village named Pompeii in 79 A.D., gaping at the sight of Mount Vesuvius blowing itself to pieces. “Oh my goodness!” just would not quite suffice, and more expressive reactions would only be pointless profanity. You would be  facing the unimaginable. You would be staring at the end of the world as you know it.

What has happened on the issues of global warming and climate change in the past few months is truly bizarre and frankly unexpected. First thousands of e-mails were hacked and several statements cherry picked out of context, twisted, and made to look like scientists were in disagreement and fighting among themselves on questions pertaining to global warming.

Well, duh, that’s what scientists do! It’s their job to pick at the edges, to squabble among themselves, to try to knock down ideas, to, well, disagree. If they did not do these things, there would be no science, no progress, no real knowledge, just superstition and the recognition of the obvious.

The most amazing thing about that phase of the operation was that among all those thousands of e-mails over a dozen years that the deniers couldn’t find anything any more damning than the extremely thin gruel they did.

Do not scientists have a right to be ironic, as in making a comment during a blizzard that questions global warming? Did that scientist in Colorado who did so believe there is no global warming because it was cold in Colorado in the winter? No, certainly not, and yet that ironic, human, personal statement was seized upon with an Aha! that could be heard all the way to Antarctica, where just today a chunk of ice described as the size of a small country fell into the ocean.

Fact check: An ironic personal comment is not scientific data. It is nothing, in fact. And there is a big part of the problem with this attack: Most of the “flaws” that have been found are on the nature of minor typographic errors, statements of opinion, guesses about the future, and other things that are not scientific data at all.

Such it was with the supposedly egregious “error” concerning the rate of melting of “the Himalayan glaciers.” This appeared on page four hundred and some of the second volume of the latest IPCC report, a work comprising nearly 3000 pages. It was one sentence, and it contained a typo apparently. It was not presented as data, not used as the basis for even a general observation much less the entire bulwark of global warming evidence. It was merely part of a huge compendium of evidence provided by several thousand scientists and cooperatively vetted by representatives of more than a hundred nations of the world. It was nothing.

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Posted in Climate Change, Communications, Essays and Opinion, Melting Planet, Politics | Comments Off

Financial Meltdown Mirrored at North Pole

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

by Val Germann

The world’s financial markets and “The Top of the World” are exhibiting a frightening similarity as winter ends: both are melting down.   In a few days the G-20 nations will sit down for a talk as the planet’s flagship currency, the U.S. Dollar,  liquefies around their ankles.  That sinking feeling has to be shared by the world’s polar bears, forced onto land and even to cannibalism by the liquefaction of the Arctic’s ice.  As a contributor to a current article on the TERRADAILY website says:

“We don’t have hard evidence about climate change but we have evidence about the numerous symptoms of climate change on polar bears.”

And those symptoms are very bad news indeed, starting with a continuing decrease in the size and weight of the bears, down more than ten percent over the last quarter-century.   One cause of this sad decline could well be the fact that the bear’s hunting season is three weeks shorter than it was in 1980.  Another is that the loss of sea ice is forcing the bears to swim ever farther in pursuit of seals, their primary food.

Even more disturbing is a new and dangerous behavior on the part of pregnant  bears:

Faced with the growing uncertainty concerning the ice, pregnant polar bears are increasingly denning on land, researchers have noticed.  In northern Alaska, two-thirds of bears now choose to den on land in order to give birth early in the year, an inverse proportion of what was observed a few years ago.  “They are refugees rather than immigrants. This is not a chosen exile, this is a forced exile,” Derocher told AFP.

The bears are much more vulnerable on land than on ice and their food sources farther away.  But even more shocking, and revealing, is the following change in polar bear behavior:

Climate change also appears to have altered the bears’ behavioural patterns.  Several recent incidents of cannibalism in Alaska have observers worried.  “We knew of polar bears killing and eating other polar bears,” Steven Amstrup, a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told AFP.  “But the difference was that this time the polar bears were clearly deliberately hunting other bears, attacking for example females in their denning area” in northern Alaska, he said.

It surely cannot get much worse than that, attacking and killing the pregnant females of your own kind.  The future for the world’s polar bears must be bleak indeed if this behavior does not stop, and soon.

But that is not likely to happen because, as one expert said:

“Any of these symptoms taken alone might not be so worrying but seen in their totality it shows a bleak picture of how climate change is impacting polar bears already now,” said Geoff York, a polar bear expert at the World Wildlife Fund.  “And it’s only forecast to get worse,” he said.

And so it may be true that the polar bear is going the way of Lehman Brothers, or that particularly ursine financial entity — Bear Stearns.  Those companies were “eating their own,” too, just as the polar bear seems to be doing, most likely with similar ultimate results.

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Posted in Agriculture Issues, Climate Change, Communications, Extinction, Melting Planet | Comments Off

On Words and Their Importance

Friday, November 28th, 2008

By David L. Brown

I’ve noted that our President Elect has declared that he will “create or save” 2.5 million jobs in the next couple of years. Since I think words are important, it is interesting to analyze that statement, to see what if any meaning it may contain.

First, we need to note that the obvious intention is to convince the public that increased employment lies ahead, more jobs for happy American taxpayers, a payoff for those faithful supporters who voted him into office. But a closer look at what the words actually mean belies that interpretation.

Okay, here’s a worst case scenario to test how Obama’s statement might hold up if things don’t go at all well. Let’s say that employment drops by 25 million, but in the meantime Obama “creates” 2.5 million jobs (say, by hiring chronically unemployed street people to join civilian brigades to enforce new taxes). The net job loss will be 22.5 million jobs—but his prediction will have been demonstrated to be completely true because he will have “created” 2.5 million jobs. Nevermind that millions more were lost in the meantime.

Again, let’s say that employment drops by 22.5 million, but due to Obama’s efforts another 2.5 million jobs are “saved” (perhaps by keeping union workers on the payrolls of nationalized Detroit automakers and other failed companies). Again, his statement will be perfectly true, but the employment picture will be disastrous. He would have made good on his promise to “create” or “save” those jobs, and no one can deny it.

Now some might argue that AND and OR mean pretty much the same thing. That is not true. In Boolean logic OR and AND have specific meanings, and the same is true in the English language. OR does not mean the same as AND or NOT, those other key Boolean factors. The use of OR means that there are two (or more) possibilities and that they are mutually exclusive. Example: “Tomorrow it will rain OR snow.” Viewed analytically the form of that statement excludes the possibility that both will occur, while insisting that one of the alternatives will. To indicate that both might occur, one must say “Tomorrow it will rain AND snow”.

Apply that insight to the Obama statement and one can conclude that he will possibly create 2.5 million jobs, OR that he may save 2.5 million jobs. These are weasel words that allow for the possibility that there may be no job growth whatsoever (lost jobs = created jobs) or even net job losses. In this case there are multiple factors (individual jobs) so the OR command must be applied to each individual case. Thus, there could be a subset of “created” jobs and a subset of “saved” jobs. Either one could consist of any number less than 2.5 million but the total number of jobs “created” and “saved” must equal that amount.

As pointed out above, the promise is not pegged to any baseline, such as present job numbers. One might “create” one unit of something while many identical units are destroyed. One might “save” one unit of something while many identical units are lost. To lay claim to the former actions in these two statements without recognizing the latter possibilities is quite misleading.

We can also observe that nothing is implied about the quality of the jobs that will be created or saved. We could see 2.5 million highly paid technical personnel laid off and taking jobs as greeters at WalMart or hamburger flippers at McDonald’s. Would they represent individuals for whom jobs had been created? In terms of the vague statement issued by Obama, absolutely. This is an example of PITS reasoning. (I just made up that acronym for the occasion, so you saw it here first. It stands for Pie In The Sky, and can be used in phrases such as “It’s the PITS” or “Our economy seems to be in the PITS,” or even “Life may be a bowl of cherries, so why do we only get the PITS”.)

All of the above scenarios could be accurately described by the words of Obama’s statement, which is therefore meaningless and misleading rhetorical garbage.

Unfortunately we better get used to this kind of empty rhetoric, not only from the One but from those already practiced in the art of obfuscation, the experienced political class of our nation. Example: Bill Clinton on what the meaning of “is” is. Some of them have been learning this craft for decades, and perhaps were born with the natural ability to be human weasels. In fact, maybe they ARE weasels, having taken human form, perhaps through some mysterious process involving intelligent design. Could be….would explain a lot in fact.

George Orwell would have understood all of this very well, as a re-reading of Animal Farm will confirm. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”)

Meanwhile, be prepared to listen even more carefully than ever to what comes out of Washington. And never forget that the best way to tell whether a politician is lying is to check whether his mouth is moving.

Finally, in case one might wonder if Obama’s choice of words might have been due to mere carelessness, I have two comments:

First, it should be of no little concern to think that our future President makes careless use of words (and there was much evidence of this during the campaign).

But second, I think it extremely likely that direct, formal statements such as the one we’ve discussed here are very carefully drafted and vetted by the President elect’s advisors, and it is almost certain that the use of the word OR was deliberate, and with intent to obfuscate and deceive. (Unless these people are even more dim-witted and sloppy than I think, which is a definite possibility.

Posted in Communications, Politics | Comments Off

Most Diabolically Misleading Magazine Cover Ever?

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

By David L. Brown

We have written much about the activities of climate change naysayers, many of them in actuality puppets whose strings are pulled by ExxonMobil and the like. The mainstream press generally takes a “balanced” approach to reporting on the subject, in which the opinions of climate scientists (who are almost unanimously convinced of the real threat of global warming) are diluted through the words and writings of those running dogs of Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Ag and all their associates.

So today at the grocery store I noticed that the current issue of Newsweek features an “expose” of the climate change coverup that has been bankrolled by self-interested corporations. Was I happy? Was I impressed at their courageous and forthright reportage? Well, frankly no. In fact, I was outraged.

Why? Well, here is the magazine’s cover as it appears this week:

newsweek.jpg

OK, do you start to see why this struck me the wrong way? To the casual glance of tens of millions of Americans as they stand in checkout lines or wander past magazine racks the screaming 60 point headline, to which their eyes are drawn like magnets by the flaming image of the Sun, states exactly what ExxonMobil would like us all to think: “Global Warming Is A Hoax.”

Only those who notice the asterisk and lean close can read the little “footnote” in the lower left of the cover, which begins to put the proper perspective on the story — and even that doesn’t come right out and state that the “naysayers” in question are wrong. To get that message loud and clear you have to actually read the in-depth article inside.

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Posted in Climate Change, Communications | 1 Comment »

“Inconvenient Truth” Ranked #3 on Amazon

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

By David L. Brown

This may be one of the shortest posts ever on Star Phoenix Base, but I had to share this good news: Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, is presently ranked No. 3 on the list of top-selling DVDs on Amazon.com. (No. 1 is the first five seasons of the hit TV series “24,” and No. 2 is “The Secret,” apparently a metaphysical explanation of the secret of life.)

The Gore film is truly important. I broke a long-standing personal vow to venture into a movie theater for the first time in nearly 20 years in order to watch it last summer. (See my review “Al Gore Film on Global Warming Is a Must-See,” posted June 23, 2006.)

Now Inconvenient Truth is out on DVD and poised to reach an even wider audience. I don’t know how often a documentary film has ranked this high in sales — very likely never — but the fact that Gore’s film is being widely purchased just has to be good news for us all. Let us hope that awareness of climate change continues to expand, exponentially if possible, from this point forward. Buy a copy. Buy several and give one to everyone you know who needs to understand the environmental dangers that lie ahead. Send one to your Congressman or Senator! (Well, no, bad idea — they are too busy raking in the pork and running for re-election to bother to watch it.)

Posted in Climate Change, Communications | Comments Off

Did Language Begin with a Gesture and a Word?

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

By David L. Brown

Disclosure statement: I am not Noam Chomsky nor do I have any formal training in the “science” of linguistics. However, I am someone to whom language has been a supreme influence, both in its spoken and particularly its written forms. With deference to Chomsky and his fellow linguists I humbly submit that the study of language may be somewhat comparable to the ancient Chinese art of reading the cracks in tortoise shells or the pronouncements of shamans around ancient campfires. That said, I wish to present my personal thoughts on the possible roots of language, that unique skill that has made human civilization possible and which sets we members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens apart from all other creatures.

As I understand it (and since I am not a serious student of linguistics I may well have a simplistic and incorrect impression of this), many linguists believe that language is something that occurred because of evolutionary changes in the human brain. Chomsky has concluded that the ability to use language is “hard wired” in the human brain from birth, and I will cede him that assumption. He further postulates that a common sense of “grammar,” the ability to put words together in certain standardized ways no matter what language the speaker is raised in, exists in human instinct. This too may be true, but whether it is or not doesn’t really matter for the ideas I will propose in this essay.

The question I will explore is: How did this all start? What was the defining event that set humans on the path to using language? Did pre-humans begin to grow huge brains in anticipation of attaining at some time in the remote future the ability to use language to communicate complex ideas and concepts? That does not seem likely. The idea that language is an evolutionary development of the human brain makes less sense to me than the idea that our brains evolved to accommodate the “discovery” of language. It’s a chicken or egg thing, and the idea of language evolving is not really the way evolution works. Plants and animals do not evolve toward some future condition, but in order to adapt to present ones.

Our animal brethren obviously have some ability to at least recognize language, or at least simple words and phrases, and in some cases to replicate the sound if not to fully understand the meaning of human words. One has only to listen to a talkative parrot to understand this fact. Even crows and ravens can make human sounds and almost appear to have the power of speech. I have a vivid memory of an experience many years ago in Lincoln Park in Chicago. I was walking past a bench where a man was sitting alone. I happened to observe as a crow flew up, settled on the other end of the bench, and addressed the man clearly: “Hello. My name’s Joe. What’s yours?” This was during the era when a man named Alan Funt had a TV show called “Candid Camera” in which people were placed in embarrassing positions which were being recorded by hidden cameras. I could see the thought process of the man on the bench as he looked warily around for the camera crew, and I have always felt it was poor manners indeed that he did not engage Joe the Crow in conversation but merely looked uncomfortable and got up and walked away. I would have at least had the good grace to tell Joe my name and ask him how he was, if only to see what response I might have gotten. No doubt a request for food.

Those of us who have been blessed with having pets know how smart “dumb” animals can be. We once had a German shepherd dog that was privileged to have a great number of “squeaky toys” in many shapes and forms. Each time we went to the grocery store, it seemed, we would purchase an addition for his vast collection. These included such things as a “sandwich,” a “hotdog,” a “mouse,” a “piece of cheese,” a “carrot,” and so forth. Each time we brought a new toy home we would introduce it to the dog, whose name was Prince, telling him its name. Later, it would be added to the rest in a large bucket in the corner of the living room. What is interesting about this is that when we would say “Prince — Get the…” and name one of the toys, he would go to the bucket, begin to throw toys all around as he searched for the requested one, and proudly bring it to us. Once a toy had been given to him and having been told its name just once, he never in several years made a mistake and brought us the wrong toy. Obviously, the ability to learn vocabulary is “hard wired” in the brain of an intelligent dog and many other animals as well as that of humans. The “grammar” described by Chomsky may not exist in animal brains, but many of the basic building blocks of language are obviously there, just as they must have been in our pre-language simian ancestors.

So how did the forebears of we “wise apes” learn to take language to the next stage and create a communications tool on which our human ancestors have built succeedingly complex civilizations? Well, now we get to my theory. Remembering that I am not a linguist, but also taking into account that linguistics may well be more an art or an exercise in philosophy than a science, please consider my idea with an open mind.

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Posted in Communications, Default File, Essays and Opinion, Evolution and Genetics | 1 Comment »

News from Another Planet?

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

By David L. Brown

From the latest issue of Science Magazine, 8 December 2006, pg. 1521, this news item is reprinted in its entirety. It does not even require commentary:

AN INCONVENIENT DVD. The producer of Al Gore’s movie about the threat of global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, has picked a fight with the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) over its refusal to send its members free DVDs of the former vice president’s tutorial on climate change. But NSTA isn’t backing down.

A 26 November op-ed in The Washington Post by environmental activist Laurie David (left)–wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David–accused NSTA of kowtowing to one of its corporate sponsors, ExxonMobil. David told Science she finds it “shocking” that NSTA would have any ties to a company “that has spent millions misinforming the public about global warming.”

NSTA Executive Director Gerald Wheeler says that David’s offer of 50,000 DVDs was rejected because of a 2001 policy that prevents NSTA from endorsing any product or message by an outside organization: “We don’t do mass distributions for anybody.” But Wheeler says he’s “not ashamed” of taking money from corporate America–including the oil and gas industry–to help improve science education.

Wheeler says NSTA has offered to mention the movie on its Web site and in its newsletters. David has already rejected another suggestion, to buy NSTA’s mailing list, at $130 per 1000 names. “You don’t want to send out a cold letter,” she says. “There are 1000 reasons why that wouldn’t work.”

Well, OK, just a little commentary: What is WRONG with these people? Are they absolutely NUTS? Or has ExxonMobil actually bought off the entire PLANET?

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. As I said before, no commentary is really needed, so just forget I said anything.

Posted in Climate Change, Communications | 1 Comment »

Words Reflect the Spirit of the Times

Monday, November 13th, 2006

By David L. Brown

Each year the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary choose a “Word of the Year,” which is intended to capture the spirit of the changing times. This year’s choice is entirely appropriate in view of the deepening bad news about the environment and humankind’s effect thereon.

The 2006 Word of the Year (well, actually a phrase) is “Carbon Neutral,” referring to ideas, concepts and plans to rein in the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to the Oxford University Press USA blog at http://blog.oup.com/:

Being carbon neutral involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset: paying to plant new trees or investing in “green” technologies such as solar and wind power.

The rise of carbon neutral reflects the growing importance of the green movement in the United States. In a CBS News/New York Times Poll in May 2006, 66% of respondents agreed that global warming is a problem that’s causing a serious impact now. 2006 also saw the launch of a new (and naturally, carbon neutral) magazine about eco-living, Plenty; the actor Leonardo DiCaprio is planning a environmentally-themed reality TV series about an eco-village; and colleges from Maine to Wisconsin are pledging to be carbon neutral within five years. It’s more than a trend, it’s a movement.

Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary 2e, said “The increasing use of the word carbon neutral reflects not just the greening of our culture, but the greening of our language. When you see first graders trying to make their classrooms carbon neutral, you know the word has become mainstream.”

“All the Oxford lexicographers look forward to choosing the Word of the Year. We know that people love fun, flashy words like truthiness or the latest Bushism, but we are always looking for a word that is both reflective of the events and concerns of the past year and also forward-looking: a word that we think will only become more used and more useful as time goes on.”

It is interesting to note that at least one other word among the nine runners-up for 2006 Word of the Year is also an environmentally related term. That word (well actually an acronym) is “CSA,” which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The concept of CSA is to support small, local farms through cooperative efforts, an example of thinking globally, acting locally.

Two other runners-up also could be counted among the threats hanging over civilization. They are “Islamofascism,” and “Elbow Bumping” (another phrase!) which is defined as an alternative to handshaking as a form of greeting, designed to avoid the spreading of germs — perhaps a good idea in case a pandemic should come along.

It will be interesting to see what words, phrases and acronyms become harbingers of future events as our uncertain future unfolds.

Posted in Climate Change, Communications | 1 Comment »

Avian Flu: Don’t Panic, It’s Only Entertainment

Monday, May 8th, 2006

By David L. Brown

We can count on the TV industry to take advantage of every opportunity to spread misinformation and fear among the public. Afer all, it serves a greater good—selling commercial time. With these people on “our side,” who needs the real terrorists. Here’s a report on the latest egregious example from the ABC Network, as reported in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Millions of bodies stacking up so fast that dump trucks must haul them away. Barbed wire to fence off and quarantine entire neighborhoods.

It’s the worst-case scenario of the bird flu — and it’s coming soon to a television near you.

ABC’s made-for-TV movie, “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America” will be broadcast at 8 p.m Tuesday, sending some public health experts and chicken producers into crisis mode as they try to help the public distinguish between science and entertainment. Read the whole story.

Leave it to ABC to cook up the absolute worst case scenario. There is a chance that avian flu could become a pandemic, and an even lesser chance that it could create total havoc in the world. There is also a chance that an asteroid will hit the Earth sometime soon (a scenario that Hollywood has already milked with at least one silly movie), that climate change will turn New York into a frozen wasteland (ditto, with the silliness turned up to the max), and perhaps even a very slim chance that a giant gorilla will climb the Empire State Building (several versions have been filmed). And we should not forget the Japanese fascination with Godzilla, the Tokyo-trampling lizard. (more…)

Posted in Communications, Disease and Pandemics | Comments Off

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