Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Expert systems, Flu, Google, MetaFilter, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams, there comes a point where the A.I. Seth is tasked with doing some research – checking the various discussion forums and public communications about whether a given topic seems to be gaining in attention. My thought in doing this was that the topic in question would manifest itself in such discussions in a statistically significant way, showing that something was happening below the threshold of conventional news sources.
Well, guess what – something very much like this is now being done by Google, in order to predict the spread of flu. Yup, Google Flu Trends. From their “How does this work?”
How does this work?
We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
OK, not *exactly* the same thing – but pretty damned close. I’d like to think that someone over at Google read Communion and got this idea, but the fact of the matter is that they were probably working on it well before my book was available. Still, interesting.
Oh, and this is another argument for the proposition that the Google search engine is an actual Artificial Intelligence, just in its early form, as I have discussed previously.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Architecture, Art, Emergency, Failure, Gene Roddenberry, Government, Humor, MetaFilter, Music, Nuclear weapons, Paleo-Future, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Society, Star Trek, Survival, YouTube
Of the apocalypse variety: via MeFi, the BBC has released all the information pertaining to plans from the 1970s to broadcast emergency signals in the event of nuclear war. From the article:
A script written by the BBC and the government to be broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack has been published.
The script, written in the 1970s and released by the National Archives, included instructions to “stay calm and stay in your own homes”.
It said communications had been disrupted, and the number of casualties and extent of damage were not known.
Gah. I remember that madness.
Well, if someone ever wants to do another post-apocalyptic movie, here’s some great locations they can use, courtesy of WebUrbanist:
7 Abandoned Architectural Wonders of Modern Asia
Abandoned buildings, properties and places take on remarkably different aesthetic character and are treated differently from one culture to the next – particularly in Asian nations where beliefs about the cultural role of architecture or the whims of a dictator can vary greatly. From South Korea to North Korea, Cambodia to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Hong Kong here are seven amazing oriental and subcontinental abandonments from the Near East to the Far East, from skyscraper hotels and pod cities to shopping malls and amusement parks and everything in between.
Some really great (and haunting) images there.
And to leave you haunted in a slightly different way…
This is another goodie from the same folks:
I like to think Gene would be amused.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Humor, ISS, MetaFilter, Music, NASA, Science, Space, String theory, tech, Wired, YouTube
. . . from Wired Science:
Tesla coils, superconductors, and hilarious music videos are great reasons to be excited about physics. Here are some of our favorites.
OK, you may have seen some of these, but they’re all worth a look. Because I’m a bit of a pyro, here are two of my favorites from the collection:
A singing Tesla coil:
And a Reuben’s Tube:
You’ll also find the LHC Rap, fun with water in space, playing with a boomerang on the ISS, Adam Savage (of MythBusters) sounding surprisingly like Penn Jillete, superfluid oddness, superconducting effects, and supersonic compression. Have fun!
Jim Downey
Via MeFi.
Filed under: ACLU, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Failure, General Musings, Government, Guns, MetaFilter, Society, Terrorism, Travel
So, you’re a retired brigadier general in the Air National Guard, and even certified to carry a pistol as a pilot of a commercial airliner, under the program designed to provide last-chance security against terrorists seizing control of a jet. What does the TSA do? Put you on the terror watch list, of course:
But there’s one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government’s terrorist “watch list.”
That means he can’t use an airport kiosk to check in; he can’t do it online; he can’t do it curbside. Instead, like thousands of Americans whose names match a name or alias used by a suspected terrorist on the list, he must go to the ticket counter and have an agent verify that he is James Robinson, the pilot, and not James Robinson, the terrorist.
“Shocking’s a good word; frustrating,” Robinson — the pilot — said. “I’m carrying a weapon, flying a multimillion-dollar jet with passengers, but I’m still screened as, you know, on the terrorist watch list.”
Along with about a million other people.
OK, that’s good, but this is even better:
Commuter Flights Grounded Thanks To Bumbling TSA Inspector
They’re the government… and remember, they’re here to help. A bumbling inspector with the Transportation Safety Administration apparently has some explaining to do, after nine American Eagle regional jets were grounded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday.
Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage… reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes’ noses as handholds.
“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. “They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.”
Sweet! As noted in a further comment on ANN:
E-I-C Note: This was an extraordinarily dangerous incident, folks. The TSA has neither the mandate nor the knowledge to inspect any aircraft for any reason. The stupidity of this matter is nearly unbelievable… until you hear that the TSA is involved… then it becomes understandable, though still tragic. And I can not tell you how frustrating it is, to see them continue to hurt an indsutry that they were created to protect.
The TSA has NO BUSINESS putting untrained personnel in a position to damage aircraft. Their bizarre games, in the name of security, do NOTHING to enhance security and do much to inhibit safety. Aviation personnel — pilots, A&P’s, ground personnel — are all either licensed or supervised by licensed personnel and this kind of tampering, had it been accomplished by anyone else, would have subjected that person to criminal charges.
But hey, they can do what they want. They’re the TSA.
Well, *maybe* there’s a chance to fight back, at least on some things:
Court: Passengers can challenge no-fly list
Critics of the government’s secret no-fly list scored a potentially important victory Monday when a federal appeals court ruled that would-be passengers can ask a judge and jury to decide whether their inclusion on the list violates their rights.
In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a suit by a former Stanford University student who was detained and handcuffed in 2005 as she was about to board a plane to her native Malaysia.
The ruling is apparently the first to allow a challenge to the no-fly list to proceed in a federal trial court, said the plaintiff’s lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.
The decision would allow individuals to demand information from the government, present evidence on why they should not have been on the list, and take the case to a jury, Elzankaly said.
Of course, it’d take time, money, and the willingness to suffer further hassle from the TSA, for standing up for your rights. Because, you know, that’d mark you as a troublemaker. Hell, just writing about these issues has probably flagged my name – we’ll see what happens the next time I need to fly somewhere, coming up in about two months.
I swear, just about the biggest thing a presidential candidate could do in my book would be to promise to get rid of the whole security theater nonsense, to reconsider whether we need the TSA as it currently exists, to revamp the Department of Homeland Security, and to return us some semblance of our rights under the Constitution. Sheesh.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi and ML, cross posted to UTI and Daily Kos.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy, Humor, MetaFilter, Science, Space, tech
OK, I spent *way* too much time playing this game last night: Orbitrunner. And because I’m the kind of guy that I am, I wanted to inflict it on you.
It’s actually a very interesting bit of gaming, for as simple as seems at first glance. Here’s the description from the site:
Control the Sun with your mouse. Use it to manipulate the planets’ paths. The Sun’s pull gets stronger as planets get closer. If the gravity is at a right angle to the direction of travel, an orbit can form. Make sure planets don’t leave the screen or collide!
I’m sure that they have established some fairly basic approximations for your computer to manipulate, but it still addresses one of the classic problems of physics: how to calculate the orbital dynamics for two or more bodies in motion. Even if you restrict the interactions to one orbital plane, this is a surprisingly difficult problem for more than two bodies, and has been for centuries. From ScienceWorld:
The three-body problem considers three mutually interacting masses
,
, and
. In the restricted three-body problem,
The efforts of many famous mathematicians have been devoted to this difficult problem, including Euler
and Lagrange
And Wikipedia has a very good entry (beyond my math level) about the broader n-body problem:
General considerations: solving the n-body problem
In the physical literature about the n-body problem (n ≥ 3), sometimes reference is made to the impossibility of solving the n-body problem. However one has to be careful here, as this applies to the method of first integrals (compare the theorems by Abel and Galois about the impossibility of solving algebraic equations of degree five or higher by means of formulas only involving roots).
The n-body problem contains 6n variables, since each point particle is represented by three space (displacement) and three velocity components. First integrals (for ordinary differential equations) are functions that remain constant along any given solution of the system, the constant depending on the solution. In other words, integrals provide relations between the variables of the system, so each scalar integral would normally allow the reduction of the system’s dimension by one unit. Of course, this reduction can take place only if the integral is an algebraic function not very complicated with respect to its variables. If the integral is transcendent the reduction cannot be performed.
Well, have fun with it. And be amused about that all that phenomenal computing power at your fingertips making a simple little game. Such is the future.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
Now, this is the way to honor an author:
it’s a fucking tripod from the war of the worlds and can be found in horsell woking, england (h.g. wells’ hometown and the area in which the first martian cylinder landed). imagine walking round the corner and coming face to face with it for the first time, groceries in hand. i’d be close to soiling my pants.
* * *
built in 1998 by michael condron, the 23ft high sculpture was “commissioned to celebrate the centenary of hg wells’ the war of the worlds” and as you can see in the last photo, next to the tripod, seemingly half-buried in the ground, is the cylinder. there are also bacteria represented by designs on surrounding stones – go here to see them. as with the baby tower, congratulations to the local authorities for giving this shiny chunk of brilliance the greenlight. it’s fantastic. if something like this existed outside my local shopping centre then i might actually go near the place.
Cool. Reminds me of a sculpture we saw while in Wales some years back, in terms of being not the usual sort of boring pigeon perch. Check it out.
Jim Downey
Via MeFi.
Filed under: Marketing, MetaFilter, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Almost a year ago I noted that the publishing industry is essentially broken, saying this:
I’d argue that when an industry is so disfunctional as to need to pull these kinds of stunts to select content, the system is broken. Completely. How is it possible that the publishing industry is in an “unending search for new talent” but is so swamped by submissions that they can’t deal with it all? They’re not looking for talent – they’re looking for name recognition, whether by existing celebrities or by ones created by this kind of gimmick. It is an aspect of our celebrity/sensationalist culture. And a $25,000 advance is considered “small”?
This morning I found an interesting discussion over on MeFi about another aspect of this: short (science) fiction. That discussion was prompted by this post from Warren Ellis, in which Ellis says regarding the few remaining major SF magazines:
As was stated over and over last year, any number of things could be done to help these magazines. But, naturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong. They’ll provide what their remaining audience would seem to want, until they all finally die of old age, and then they’ll turn out the lights. And that’ll be it for the short-fiction sf print magazine as we know it.
It’s time now, I think, to turn attention to the online sf magazines. I personally live in hope that, one day, some of them move from net to print, and create a new generation of paper magazines. But, regardless, it’s time to focus on them — on what they do, how they generate revenue, and what their own future is.
In the MeFi discussion there are a lot of good points made about the current state of the magazine industry and publishing in general, several such made by published SF authors. But a comment by one poster in particular stands out:
The problem is with modern consumer culture, not with the publishing companies. They’re doing the best they can. I mean, look at this little press release: Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2007 increased slightly to 276,649 new titles and editions, up from the 274,416 that were published in 2006. That’s a complaint. The business folks are upset that there wasn’t more growth.
Now think about that for a second. That’s… a lot of fucking books. Sure, the majority of those are non-fiction titles of various sorts, but there’s a ton of fiction titles in that number. That number every year. Of new titles. You say “I just have to wonder how many other books are out there, moldering like mine was for so long because there simply isn’t any entryway into the industry any more.” I guarantee you that there are more than you think, that the number of books actually being published is a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of books that people want to publish. So try to, just for a moment, imagine the pressure of try to sort through the chaff to find the wheat, something that will both sell (because that’s what your bosses want) and also something that is awesome (because that’s what you want; not that you don’t want it to sell, too, because what good is it if it’s awesome if no one reads it). Then think about how to get your book, or you handful of books, into the readers hands, instead of one of the 274,415 other books being published this year. And then think about how many people in America don’t read at all; I bet you can find numbers. I bet you are acquainted with more people who don’t read, or at least don’t read more than a handful of books each year, than you are with people who read voraciously.
Yeah, the industry is broken, and we have only ourselves to blame.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Book Conservation, Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, Marketing, MetaFilter, Promotion, Publishing, Quantum mechanics, Science, Science Fiction, tech
Some little servings this morning.
Excellent large collection of images from the Large Hadron Collider at the Boston Globe’s site, via MeFi.
Via just about everywhere: the ‘Collector’s Edition‘ of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling. I suppose if you sell as many books as Rowling does, an edition of 100,000 can be considered ‘limited for collectors’. If anyone spends $100.00 on this book for me I will kick them. Oh, I’ve written about Beedle before.
Got an Alice fixation?
Perhaps I should consider this idea – selling ‘shares’ of my future royalties for Communion of Dreams. Think I can get a buck each for a couple dozen? Also via MeFi.
All for now. More later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Constitution, Cory Doctorow, Daily Kos, General Musings, Government, MetaFilter, N. Am. Welsh Choir, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Terrorism, Travel
In May, Bruce Schneier wrote this:
Crossing Borders with Laptops and PDAs
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
Well, we now know the response:
Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border
No Suspicion Required Under DHS PoliciesFederal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.
Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Basically, they can take any electronic or other device capable of storing data for as long as they want, for no reason at all. Yes, I said “other device”. From the Washington Post article cited above:
The policies cover “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,” including hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover “all papers and other written documentation,” including books, pamphlets and “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter.’ “
Think about that for just a moment. They have to right to take anything of yours which could contain data, and keep it for as long as they think they need it. Furthermore, they can share it with others as they see fit. Will the data be secure? Will it be destroyed if not needed? Will your laptop (etc) be returned to you unmolested and intact, or will it have some spyware installed to record your keystrokes? (This last item plays a pivotal plot point in Communion of Dreams, so I tend to think of such things).
What to do?
Accept that the authorities will do this, and not worry about it? Don’t cross the boarder? Try and hide your data? Simply don’t take any such devices with you?
We’re going to Patagonia in about 10 weeks. My wife has been considering taking her laptop, since she is part of the organizing team for the tour we’ll be on. I told her that I don’t recommend it. But it’s her call. At the very least, I hope that she – and anyone else who has to do this – will take the time to consider Schneier’s advice on how to do so safely. Here’s a bit:
So your best defence is to clean up your laptop. A customs agent can’t read what you don’t have. You don’t need five years’ worth of email and client data. You don’t need your old love letters and those photos (you know the ones I’m talking about). Delete everything you don’t absolutely need. And use a secure file erasure program to do it. While you’re at it, delete your browser’s cookies, cache and browsing history. It’s nobody’s business what websites you’ve visited. And turn your computer off – don’t just put it to sleep – before you go through customs; that deletes other things. Think of all this as the last thing to do before you stow your electronic devices for landing. Some companies now give their employees forensically clean laptops for travel, and have them download any sensitive data over a virtual private network once they’ve entered the country. They send any work back the same way, and delete everything again before crossing the border to go home. This is a good idea if you can do it.
If you can’t, consider putting your sensitive data on a USB drive or even a camera memory card: even 16GB cards are reasonably priced these days. Encrypt it, of course, because it’s easy to lose something that small. Slip it in your pocket, and it’s likely to remain unnoticed even if the customs agent pokes through your laptop. If someone does discover it, you can try saying: “I don’t know what’s on there. My boss told me to give it to the head of the New York office.” If you’ve chosen a strong encryption password, you won’t care if he confiscates it.
There’s also advice (and links) in that essay on how to partition your hard drive to include hidden material, how to encrypt your data safely, and so forth. Use according to how valuable your data is. But keep in mind that showing up at the boarder (or Customs) with such encryption evident is a sure way to attract attention and make your day more difficult. Not fun.
What I find astonishing, and extremely insightful, is this quote from that WaPo piece:
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in an opinion piece published last month in USA Today that “the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices.” Searches have uncovered “violent jihadist materials” as well as images of child pornography, he wrote.
With about 400 million travelers entering the country each year, “as a practical matter, travelers only go to secondary [for a more thorough examination] when there is some level of suspicion,” Chertoff wrote. “Yet legislation locking in a particular standard for searches would have a dangerous, chilling effect as officers’ often split-second assessments are second-guessed.”
A “chilling effect”, Mr. Chertoff? Funny, that term is more commonly used and understood in how government can infringe on the civil rights of law-abiding Americans. To make the claim that the government’s agents are the ones suffering such an infringement in their duties is to turn the entire notion of governmental authority coming *from* the people on its head, and says rather that those public employees are something more akin to our rulers than servants.
But I suppose that this is hardly surprising in this day and age.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI. Also see further discussion at MetaFilter, Daily Kos, and BoingBoing.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Civil Rights, Constitution, Emergency, Government, Guns, MetaFilter, Preparedness, Science Fiction, Society, Violence, YouTube
OK, this post is about guns. In particular the M1911 .45. You’ve been warned.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recently a friend passed along this quote:
“A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.”
– Bertrand de Jouvenal –
I’ve frequently talked about guns, and several times explicitly mentioned that my basically liberal/libertarian political philosophy is completely comfortable with understanding the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution as being an individual right. Part of this is in realizing that the world is a dangerous place and that you have to make reasonable preparations to take care of yourself. And part of it is understanding that one check on the abuse of governmental power is a population which is armed and prepared to defend its civil liberties.
No, I have no illusions that I, with a few pistols and shotguns (or my flintlock), am any kind of a challenge to a modern police force, let alone an actual army. And that is the way it should be – no individual should be outside the law. But collectively, a populace armed with tens of millions of such weapons presents a real check on tyranny. The calculus of trying to use military-level force against the population of the US would have to take this into account; either overwhelming mass destruction (and I’m not saying it would have to include WMDs) would have to be employed, or such a military force would have to be willing to suffer significant casualties. This is a substantial disincentive to anyone who might be willing to attempt such a thing.
Not that I can’t imagine possible scenarios where this may come to pass. In fact, one such is part of the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams, following the initial Fire Flu of the backstory. I may get around to writing some of that one of these days, though there is already a fair amount of literature with that setting available.
Anyway, this rumination was prompted by my friend’s quote, and on a nice post that I came across on MeFi that linked to a cool animation of assembling an M1911 .45:
If you would like to see an even better animation of how a 1911 functions, which allows you to hide or show various components as it operates, then go check out this site. I had shot a fairly standard 1911 a good deal when I was young, but was never particularly enamored of that style of gun, preferring more ‘modern’ semi-auto pistols. Until I was gifted with a very nice one from a friend’s collection early this year – a modification on the standard design which provides for the additional safety of a double-action trigger. It is perhaps the sweetest-shooting pistol I have, even while being one of the most powerful ones. There is a lot to be said for the venerable design of the 1911, a gun said to be designed by a genius for use by morons, with ballistic performance suitable for service in four wars . Works for me.
Well, as I’ve said before, I know a lot of people don’t want a gun in their home. Fine, don’t have one. But if you are going to have one, learn to use it and store it safely. And if you’re going to have one, you certainly could do a lot worse than have a 1911 model .45 of some variation.
Jim Downey
(Hat tip to Jerry for the quote!)
Communion Of Dreams 