Filed under: Brave New World, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society
It’s been a while since I’ve written much of anything about economic conditions; frankly, the whole mess was just too depressing no matter how I looked at it, and I knew (and said) that the end result was going to be that we would wind up transferring more of our wealth to the bastards who caused the economic collapse.
But it is worthwhile to look at what happened and why. And this is perhaps the best examination I’ve found yet of the systemic, structural problems which are behind the latest mess. It’s a somewhat dense and jargon-packed piece on finance, but here’s the money quote:
For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism. It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem. The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
“Too soft and cushy,” indeed. I must admit (and have before) that one of the reasons that I wrote the backstory to Communion of Dreams the way I did was, as Umberto Eco said so well, “I wanted to poison a monk.” A certain part of me thinks that a good round of ‘off with their heads’ would be really healthy for our society overall, though somewhat less so for Wall Street.
Jim Downey
Holbrooke was the chief architect of the Dayton Accords, the agreement which helped end the war in Bosnia. The agreement was signed fifteen years ago today. The veteran US diplomat was 69.
* * * * * * *
I took the phone call in the kitchen of my aunt & uncle’s house (this was long before cell phones). I had spent my adolescence in this home, after they took me in following the death of my parents. Now myself and some friends were staying there for a big SCA event to be held in my hometown: my first coronation as “king“. It was going to be a festive event, a day which was to be filled with fun and a bit of pomp, something to be celebrated and enjoyed.
I listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. We talked. Not many words were used, but much was said. I hung up the phone, looked to my future wife. Even then, she could read my face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something’s happened.”
* * * * * * *
Betty, the friend who was going to be my “queen”, looked at me. We were in a small room set aside for our use prior to the coronation ceremony. I don’t remember if anyone else was in the room at the time, but things were generally in chaos. What had ‘happened’ was that the night before a carload of friends who were traveling to attend our coronation had been killed in an accident. 4 people, known and beloved, were dead. Everyone was in shock, understandably.
Betty looked at me. She was a smart, caring woman, capable of dealing with just about anything. A child-abuse investigator, she had the training and temperament to understand tough emotional situations and still see what needed to be done. At that moment I realized just how incredibly fortunate I was to have her as a partner in the role I was about to play.
Betty looked at me, and I at her. There was compassion in her face. “Suddenly, it’s not just a game anymore, is it?”
* * * * * * *
Sunday was the anniversary of my father’s death. It’s been 41 years. My mom died about 18 months later. Both deaths were unexpected – one due to violence, the other accident.
They were not the first deaths I had known. And they certainly have not been the last. I’ve lost friends and loved ones. I’ve been there at the end to do what I can for another.
At 52, this is not uncommon. Most of us experience these things as we move through adulthood. But, prodigy that I was, I was ahead of the curve when I was younger.
* * * * * * *
Betty looked at me, and I at her. There was compassion in her face. “Suddenly, it’s not just a game anymore, is it?”
“No. Real people, real emotions.” I remember thinking that for all that that day was not what I had expected, there was some small part of me which was . . . satisfied . . . that I had entirely too much experience with such matters. Even with the shock and pain, I felt capable of dealing with what was to come.
She saw it, and knew. “Well, let’s go do what we can for everyone.”
* * * * * * *
Holbrooke was the chief architect of the Dayton Accords, the agreement which helped end the war in Bosnia. The agreement was signed fifteen years ago today. The veteran US diplomat was 69.
The radio moved on to the next story. My wife glanced at me. We were both getting dressed to go on our morning walk, adding extra layers because of the cold. “69. I heard that earlier. He was just ten years older than me.”
“Yeah.”
“It got me thinking about, well, unexpected death.”
“Me too.” I paused, looked at her. “I think about that all the time.”
“I know.”
* * * * * * *
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech
Way back in the lost mists of time, someone, somewhere on Facebook decided that they would post something in recognition of friends and loved ones struggling with a disease. Someone else liked what they said, and so in solidarity, cross-posted the same item, perhaps tweaking it just a little. This process continued, and a meme was born. Here is the latest version of it:
Most people have 1000 wishes for Christmas; a cancer patient only has one, to get better. I know 97% of you won’t repost this to your status, but my friends will be the 3% that do. In honor of someone who has passed, is still fighting, or survived cancer.
OK, it could have just been a year ago that this particular meme started. I’ve only been on Facebook for about six months. But I have seen multiple variations of this thing sweep through my ‘friends’, each time with a different disease or cause substituted for “cancer”. My guess, however, in watching the social dynamic, is that this sort of thing has been going on forever.
Harmless? Just a bit of social bonding, people taking a moment to express a concern they have?
Probably. And perhaps it is only because I’m coming up on the anniversary of my father’s death that this latest item rubbed me the wrong way. I know I get sensitive about such things about this time of year.
But I don’t think it is harmless. I think it is a form of emotional blackmail: “Do this or you don’t *really* care about cancer, you heartless bastard.” And because people don’t want to come off as being a heartless bastard, they fall for it.
I’ve considered driving this point home by going through and posting every single variation on this meme I can think of, just to point out the absurdity of the practice. There’s cancer. Diabetes. Heart disease. Violence. Child abuse. Automotive safety. Terrorism. Et cetera, et cetera. I could spend the whole next month doing nothing but posting status updates which are variations on this theme.
Of course, all it would do is just alienate everyone who knows me. And that pretty much defeats the purpose for my signing up for Facebook to start with.
But that is exactly my point – why I don’t think these things are harmless. Because they prey upon the social lubrication through which the site functions, leeching away real emotion and connectivity. In some ways, this is an artificial lifeform, the online equivalent of a parasite.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Failure, Government, Predictions, Privacy, Society, Travel
I haven’t written a lot about the most recent outrage over the “porno scanners” though it seems that my predictions almost a year ago are certainly coming true. And now the folks at Gizmodo have a nice addition to the mess:
One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans
At the heart of the controversy over “body scanners” is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.
A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that U.S. Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly-perhaps illegally-saved images of the scans of public servants and private citizens.
* * *
Yet the leaking of these photographs demonstrates the security limitations of not just this particular machine, but millimeter wave and x-ray backscatter body scanners operated by federal employees in our courthouses and by TSA officers in airports across the country. That we can see these images today almost guarantees that others will be seeing similar images in the future. If you’re lucky, it might even be a picture of you or your family.
Something to look forward to from our fine friends at the TSA.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society
As I’ve noted recently, I’m pretty much a hard-nosed skeptic. But as I said in that post:
But I am much less willing to invest my energy into any enterprise which doesn’t seem to be well grounded in proven reality.
“Proven reality.” Well, what constitutes proof?
* * * * * * *
The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive
avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results; and, across all 9 experiments, Stouffer’s z = 6.66, p = 1.34 × 10-11 with a mean effect size (d) of 0.22. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.
* * * * * * *
Communion of Dreams is about a re-evaluation of reality. As I note on the homepage for the book, a dust jacket blurb could read in part:
When an independent prospector on Titan discovers an alien artifact, assumptions based on the lack of evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence are called into question. Knowing that news of such a discovery could prompt chaos on Earth, a small team is sent to investigate and hopefully manage the situation. What they find is that there’s more to human history, and human abilities, than any of them ever imagined. And that they will need all those insights, and all those abilities, to face the greatest threat yet to human survival.
* * * * * * *
That .pdf above comes from the site of DARYL J. BEM, Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. His work is starting to get some real notice. Why? Well, here’s a nice summation:
Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to “see into the future” is often referred to as psi phenomena.
Although prior research has been conducted on the psi phenomena – we have all seen those movie images of people staring at Zener cards with a star or wavy lines on them – such studies often fail to meet the threshold of “scientific investigation.” However, Bem’s studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology – studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times – and simply reversed their chronological order.
And a very good description of one of the specific experiments:
Perceiving Erotic Stimuli from the Future
The first experiment described in Bem’s new paper involves perceiving erotic stimuli from the future — specifically, perceiving whether an erotic picture is going to appear in a certain location or not. As usual in empirical psychology, the experimental setup is a bit involved — but if you want to really appreciate the evidence for precognition that Bem has obtained, there’s no substitute for actually understanding some of the experiments he did. So I’m going to quote Bem’s paper at some length here, regarding his first experiment.
The setup was, in Bem’s words, as follows:
One hundred Cornell undergraduates, 50 women and 50 men, were recruited for this experiment using the Psychology Department’s automated online sign-up system. They either received one point of experimental credit in a psychology course offering that option or were paid $5 for their participation. Both the recruiting announcement and the introductory explanation given to participants upon entering the laboratory informed them that
[t]his is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all.
And the result? From the same source as above:
1. “Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%.” (which is highly statistically significant given the number of trials involved, according to the calculations shown in the paper)
2. “In contrast, their hit rate on the non-erotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8. This was true across all types of non-erotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but non-erotic pictures, 50.2%.”In other words the hypotheses made in advance of the experiment were solidly confirmed. The experiment yielded highly statistically significant evidence for psychic precognition. Much more than would be expected at random, given the number of subjects involved, the Cornell students were able to perceive the erotic stimuli from the future — but not, in this context, the non-erotic ones.
* * * * * * *
[Spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams the discovery is that we live in a reality which has been subject to artificial controls on our psychic abilities. Why this was done is unclear, and exactly what range of ‘natural’ psychic ability humans have isn’t known. These are things which I may explore at greater length in subsequent books (hint, hint.)
But I do find it fascinating that there are these cracks in our current perception of reality. Little glimpses into perhaps a greater understanding. There may not be a concerted effort to hide the truth from us, as in my book, but there is something going on, some way in which our scientific theories only ride along the surface of a wave without penetrating it. Perhaps we exist not in the moment, but in a moving field of possibilities, some of which are so powerful that they echo backwards in time.
It’s something to consider. Playfully.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Blade Runner, movies, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech
I’ll often re-watch a favorite movie. But seldom will I do so in the span of a couple of days.
However, this weekend I watched something which was so visually compelling, and which had me pondering a number of different issues, that I held onto the NetFlix envelop for an extra day so that I could watch the movie again after I had time to digest the first viewing of it. That movie is Renaissance.
OK, there are a lot of things to like about this movie. But first, let me say a couple of things about its weaknesses. The plot has minor problems. The dialog is uneven in places. Some of the characters are cartoonish.
Yet overall the movie is a success. As noted, most of the visuals are incredibly compelling – which is quite a nice accomplishment in using black & white (and grey tone) animation. When I re-watched the movie last night, I found myself pausing it just to take in some scenes more completely, and a bunch of the movie I watched at half-speed, just so I could appreciate how the artists did what they did.
I was also intrigued to see the vision of the near-term future the movie is based on. It’s set in 2054, just two years later than my novel Communion of Dreams is set. And a lot of the tech they foresee is the same sort of thing I do, at least that’s implied by what shows up on the screen. I found myself wanting to know a *lot* more about that world and how things worked – a good sign, and part of the reason I wanted to think about the movie for a couple of days before watching it again.
Another good thing about Renaissance are the references it makes to other highly regarded science fiction stories, as well as some of the less well-known ‘arthouse’ movies. But it doesn’t beat you over the head with those, or drop them in gratuitously – they serve a purpose, and are part of the overall look and story of the movie.
If you like good science fiction, if you like film noir, if you like animation not intended for children, then track down and watch Renaissance.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Failure, Government, Predictions, Press, Society
Back in May I wrote about the drug raid debacle that happened here in Columbia which got world-wide attention when the video of the raid went viral.
After initially handling the whole mess poorly, our (new since the raid) Police Chief has taken significant and substantial steps to address the root problems that led to the raid, and subsequent police actions have shown that those steps are working as intended. No longer is the city’s SWAT team called out to serve routine search warrants, and there have been several large scale drug busts that demonstrate the other changes are being observed. This is a very good and very welcome change, and the new policy seems to be working as intended.
And yet I am happy that another aspect of this whole matter has just been put into motion: the filing of a lawsuit by the family targeted in the initial raid. From the newspaper account:
A civil suit was filed around noon today in Jefferson City’s U.S. Western District Court against the city of Columbia and 13 other defendants concerning a February drug-related SWAT raid in southwest Columbia.
* * *
The suit seeks restitution for damages to personal property and medical and veterinary expenses, Harper said. Bullet holes, a dead dog and another wounded dog resulted in thousands of dollars in damages, he said. The suit is filed against the police officers who were on scene for the incident and their contribution toward the violation of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, he said.
“This is all about demanding professionalism from our law enforcement agencies,” Harper said.
Exactly right.
The policy changes instituted are good. But policy can be changed back entirely too easily. It is critically important that our police department, and our city, understand that there is a very real cost associated with that previous behaviour. That way they won’t have any incentive to return to it in the future.
Now, I am not happy, as a taxpayer, that any settlement or judgment arising from this suit will likely come out of the city’s coffers (some of it may be offset by insurance, but I bet the city will be held liable for most if not all of the cost). It means less money for the city to do other, more constructive things. But such is the cost of supporting the civil rights of all of us.
Jim Downey
“Can you tell me your wife’s birthdate?” asked the salesperson.
I was there to pick up a Rx for my wife, just running an errand. I looked at the woman. “I didn’t know there was going to be a pop quiz.”
* * * * * * *
You know those online ‘security’ questions that some sites use, to make sure you are who you say you are if you ever forget a password or something? Well, a lot of times one of the options is the birthday for one (or both) of your parents.
I never choose that option.
No, it’s not because it would be too easy to look up, and therefore not a very good security question. It’s because I don’t remember.
That may seem odd. Who doesn’t remember the birthday of your parents? What kind of child are you??
I ask myself that sometimes. I probably should know this. And I feel vaguely guilty that I don’t.
But I didn’t grow up celebrating my parent’s birthdays. At least not that I remember. I may have when I was young. But most of that part of my life was wiped away after my parents died.
* * * * * * *
You’d think that after almost 23 years of marriage, I’d know my wife’s birthday. Sheesh. It’d take a real dipshit not to, right? Or it’d be an indication of a lack of attention, or caring, or love.
Right?
Well, maybe. Maybe not.
This is part of the intro from one of the “months” (November: Endgame) in the caregiving book:
In the last year or so of care giving for Martha Sr, I got sick and tired of hearing some variation of the comment “You’re a saint for doing this.”
Oh, those friends and acquaintances meant well, when they said it. So I didn’t respond except to thank them for their kind words.
But I knew I was not a saint. I did not do this out of some kind of religious belief. I did it out of simple, intense love and respect – both for my wife, and for her mother. And in doing it, I became a better person.
* * * * * * *
My sister was born on July 30. Or maybe 31. I can never keep it straight which one it was.
I remember the event. It’s one of the few real anchors I have left from my childhood.
But it happened close to midnight. And I have been confused about which day it was, ever since.
* * * * * * *
“Dates are . . . slippery things,” I said. I was trying to explain to my wife about picking up her Rx. “You know it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, right?”
“Of course.”
She turned and went up the stairs, to shower.
“I love you.”
“I know. I love you, too,” she called as she disappeared upstairs.
* * * * * * *
“Can you tell me your wife’s birthdate?” asked the salesperson.
I was there to pick up a Rx for my wife, just running an errand. I looked at the woman. “I didn’t know there was going to be a pop quiz.”
The salesperson looked at me, with a certain amount of pity. Or maybe that was my imagination.
“It’s March 21. Or the 27. I can never keep it straight,” I said.
She wrote both dates down. “Thanks.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t lack of attention, or a lack of love.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 